Quote:
Originally Posted by WhiteTiger
When it was still pretty much a baby Expo in 2012, the owners scored a major coup in a Reunion show of the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast. It'd been 10 years since the last time they had all been together, and it was a major feat for Calgary to score it.
At the time, tickets were sold differently. You could buy a 1 day pass, but it was for ANY of the days, not a specific day pass. Also, they sold passes at the door. Since at that point they'd never filled to capacity, it was not really a big issue with them to keep track of how many people were there between the one day passes (they assumed folks would average out the day they showed up, so they weren't well tracked) and the door sales. So the only way they had of knowing how many people were actually currently, at that moment, inside was...none. They couldn't have told you a straight answer.
But the interest in the Next Generation Reunion threw everything into chaos, as everyone who had a one day pass wanted to use it for that day, and everyone who didn't have a one day pass mobbed the on-site sales.
To say that the Expo wasn't prepared for that is...an understatement. Poor line control, poor 'people traffic' management around the grounds, and many MANY more people than they could possibly handle.
It got so bad as there were so many people crammed in that they were forced to refuse entry, regardless of what kind of pass/reason you had. If you left the building for ANY reason (like, to go have a smoke) you were refused re-entry. It got bad enough that the Fire Marshal was pondering shutting the entire thing down.
Eventually the Expo and the Fire Marshall came to terms as things got dealt with, but it was a huge mess and left a lot of people quite (justifiably, imo) upset at several aspects of the Expo, as well as opening the Expo Management's eyes to the fact that their little show wasn't so little anymore.
Part of the fallout from that was the hiring of someone who's job it was was to basically redesign and reschedule the Expo and events, so that 'the crush' didn't happen again.
From part of the fixes for 'the Incident' was the creation of the Crisis/Response Team, of which I was a part of for 5 years.
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It was amazing how much that ‘incident’ changed everything for the Expo. For me the next couple of years were huge, with the Middle Earth and Aliens Exposed type shows. What I really like was their ability on who they got as guests, it seemed that talent agencies were willing to deal with them because they were not a corporation.
I have heard that some agencies don’t like to deal with Fanexpo management. I know a couple of top end volunteers that “left” because of the new management.