Bring a tent, food, music and create your own experience: What’s considered as important for AfrikaBurn?

Abstract Hosting events entails various factors and elements that need to be managed effectively to create and ensure an enjoyable experience for attendees. To ensure that a festival exceed the attendees’ expectations and needs, event-specific research should be conducted, as it is imperative that event managers understand the attendees’ expectations. This can be achieved by gathering feedback from attendees at a festival focusing on the aspects they regard as important, also known as CSFs. Therefore, this study was conducted at the 2018 AfrikaBurn festival hosted in the Tankwa Karoo, South Africa to determine what attendees consider important when attending this festival. A qualitative approach whereby, non-probability convenience sampling was applied, and a semi-structured interview guide was used to obtain the data. A total of 45 interviews were included in the analysis whereby, Creswell’s six steps was used which revealed participants’ profiles and main themes for the CSFs; Important factors for AfrikaBurn and Factors for an improved AfrikaBurn. The findings indicate event-specific CSFs unique to AfrikaBurn and contributes to literature regarding CSFs for managing events and also to the events industry. It is recommended to conduct further research at AfrikaBurn to better understand this unique event’s attendees and also continue researching other events to determine more event-specific CSFs.