Important Announcement From Keswick Mountain Festival
The following is a message from the KMF team that is not due to be made public until tomorrow lunchtime. They have given KTA members advance sight of this so that you can be prepared for calls from guests wanting to potentially change dates. Please do not share this information on social media or contact your guests until the official announcement has been made. An email will be going out at 1pm and it will be shared on social media at 2pm.
Dear all,
I am sure you have been studying the Covid recovery roadmap as closely as we have and will have the step change dates in your diaries. The change to step 3, on or after 17th May, is perilously close to the current Keswick Mountain Festival weekend of 21st to 23rd May. As you will know, if that date slips by only one week, not only would we not be able to operate the music, but your hotels, bed & breakfasts and campsites would not be open. This would leave 55% of our visitors with nowhere to stay, as well as the entire organising team and the vast majority of exhibitors. This makes it far too risky to remain on those May dates, especially as we would only get 2 to 3 weeks notice.
So we needed to find alternative dates. We have looked at a range of options and have settled on the weekend of 10th to 12th September. We know that a change to the dates is far from ideal, it is however critical if we are to keep the Festival as part of the Keswick calendar. One of the biggest issues will be accommodation availability, as we know that you are already busy taking bookings. We have therefore increased the size of our pop up campsite, so we can accommodate more visitors. Rest assured that this is only a temporary measure, a key objective for the Festival remains to provide Keswick accommodation providers with a busy weekend, Keswick Tourism Association is an important stakeholder in our planning.
We will be announcing this date change to our visitors at 1pm on Thursday 4 March. You will undoubtedly be contacted by visitors and we thank you in advance for any assistance you are able to give them and for all your hard work. If you are not able to accommodate a request for a change in booking you may wish to roll the booking over in 2022 rather than offer a refund. We will be back in our normal dates of 20th to 22nd May, the weekend before the bank holiday.
Many thanks and very best wishes,
The KMF Team
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