A TikTok creator is urging music fans to think twice before splurging on a Coachella trip, saying the experience left her deeply disappointed and out thousands of dollars.
Lottie Starrs, who attended the annual Indio, Calif., festival as a regular attendee rather than a sponsored influencer, detailed her grievances in a viral video, citing exorbitant costs, poor logistics, extreme weather, and an atmosphere she described as more about social media clout than music.
@lottiestarrs Maybe if i would have gone with a brand as an influencer things would have been different but idk #coachella
♬ original sound – Lottie
“If you’re not going as an influencer, you don’t have your entire trip paid for,” Starrs said. “Coachella cost, like, thousands of dollars. The accommodation, the Ubers, and the actual festival itself are all so freaking expensive. Like, super, insanely expensive. Like, thousands of dollars. And the accommodations you find will be overpriced, and they’re not even that good.”
Logistics inside the festival proved equally frustrating. Starrs said arriving attendees received little guidance from event staff, leaving crowds confused about drop-off locations and stuck in prolonged traffic.
“Getting inside the festival is a nightmare,” she said. “There’s no place for you to be dropped off at festivals. Like, really disorganized. So I remember we asked like 20 different people, where do we go? And they were like, ” Oh, we don’t know. And they actually worked for the event, so you’ll end up sitting in traffic for most of the time before you can find a spot and get dropped off.”
The walk from drop-off to the festival grounds posed particular challenges for a friend she accompanied who uses a wheelchair.
“You think that’s the end of it, right? But no, you have another, what feels like an hour-long walk to actually get into the festival,” she said. “The walk you have to do is on the super dusty, bumpy, like, unpaved road, which was really hard for my friend because they were in a wheelchair, so I was trying to pull them, and then I felt bad because they kept getting knocked over and falling out of the wheelchair. So it was not wheelchair-accessible. Friendly.”
Once inside, Starrs found little relief from the elements.
“Blazing sun is so hot, but there’s no places to sit, there’s no shade, so you end up just sitting on the ground,” she said. “And it can get really, really dirty. And people just kind of throw their garbage around.”
Stage distances made it nearly impossible to catch full sets, she added.
“It feels like each stage is like 30 minutes away from each other,” Starrs said. “So by the time you can run over to the next stage, like, that set is over. So you end up just missing a lot of your favorite people, and you only end up getting to see like five or 10 minutes of the people you like.”
The aesthetic she had anticipated also fell short. Despite the festival’s heavily photographed reputation, Starrs called the décor sparse.
“I would expect the festival to be decorated really cute, but it’s really plainly decorated,” she said. “Like, they threw one or two things here, and most of the things that you see or the stuff that people take pictures in front of, that’s kind of it. It’s not as well decorated as I thought it would be, so that was really disappointing, cause for me, that’s really important.”
She also took issue with the overall atmosphere, describing fellow attendees as more interested in saying they attended than in the music itself.
“Everyone’s vibe is really, really bad,” Starrs said. “A lot of people were pretty mean. Everyone’s just there to say that they were there and to be like, oh, I’m at Coachella. And it’s less about the music and more just about, like, kind of showing off.”
Navigating the crowds posed its own challenges, she said.
“Felt like when I’ve been to other concerts, everyone’s pretty nice about letting you through and stuff, but at Coachella, everyone can get pretty mean and be like, no, you’re not coming this way,” she said. “So it’s, like, harder to work your way through the crowd or to reconnect with your friends or anything if you lose them.”
Photo opportunities, a central draw for many attendees, also proved more difficult than expected.
“It’s not as easy to take cute pictures as you think,” Starrs said. “Literally everyone’s taking pictures. It’s like a field of cows, but instead of cows, it’s people. And so everywhere you go, when you try to take a cute picture, someone will bump into you, they’ll run into you. There’s like 500 people behind you in your photo.”
By the festival’s final night, for which Starrs said she had obtained an artist guest pass, she had fallen ill from the combination of daytime heat, cold desert nights, and heavy dust.
“During the daytime, it’s burning hot, and then at nighttime, it’s freezing cold, and the dust is really, really intense,” she said. “Like, you’ll blow your nose, and there’ll be black dirt coming out of your nose. So I just got really sick from the extreme weather changes and the dust. So the third night, I couldn’t even enjoy the festival, and I probably was only there for, like, 30 minutes, and I had to leave.”
Starrs closed her video with a pointed recommendation.
“I definitely think there’s way better concerts and festivals to go to,” she said. “They’re way more cheaper and way more fun and way more worth the money. Don’t feel bad if you’re missing out.”
