WARNING! AVOID!!! UNSAFE VENUE!!!

I have attended well over one-hundred concerts in my lifetime and can honestly say that the Blink-182 show last night (7/24/24) at the Xfinity Theatre was, hands down, the worst experience I’ve ever had.

What I witnessed was so atrocious that I feel compelled to give notice to the local government, the police force, and the fire marshall.

There is gross mis-management happening here and the owners of this venue should be ashamed of how this place is run.

Avoid the Xfinity Theater like the plague, especially if you’re considering going as a family, your children are not safe here.

I could easily author a 3,000+ word essay justifying the aforementioned statements but will distill the information down to the key points you as the consumer need to know.

PARKING

After doing some research about this aspect of the venue I read things like “consider VIP” parking and “they have this down to a science,” neither of which are accurate. There was so much traffic surrounding the venue that it took almost a full hour to travel two miles. If I had paid for VIP parking I would not have been able to use it; local police were rerouting traffic in every direction, you simply could not get to the venue itself in a car, we were forced to park in an area which required a 20+ minute walk from our vehicle to the front gate.

LAWN AREA

We purchased tickets for the lawn and it was absolutely oversold, there was an ocean of people; so many in fact that you were unable to move around; they literally had us packed in like sardines. This issue was further exacerbated by the fact that the lawn area has a single entrance/exit consisting of a very long staircase running at what I estimate to be a 60 degree angle. If there was a fire or other catastrophic event there’s simply no way for the massive crowd to exit safely. I was filled with anxiety the entire time,” if something bad happens I’m going to be trampled to death.

LAWN SEATING

You are not allowed to bring your own chairs to the lawn area and can purchase ones to rent. There were at least a 100 people walking around with chairs that had no place to put them because of the previously stated sardine situation. I found this to be a disgusting money grab, the venue needs to stop renting chairs once they run out of space.

OVERSERVING ALCOHOL

About one-quarter of the crowd was completely wasted. It’s a rock concert, a summer night, a multi-platinum national act, and a free country. People like to drink, I get it. However, there are two major issues here. At most venues when someone is unable to walk or function they get ejected, that simply was not the case here; security staff paid no mind to people in this condition.

What’s even more egregious is the overservering of alcohol with reckless abandon. I stayed at this show for only about fifty minutes and during this time I watched at least a dozen vendors move through the crowd selling beer out of coolers, not a single one was selling water. If you are unable to stand, the venue should not be selling you more alcohol. I watched someone puke their guts up only to have a vendor offer them more alcohol seconds later. This disturbed me to the point where I said something to the vendor, “hey, a lot of these people are really messed up”, the response “What do I care?”

That last statement really sums it up; the owners, the management, and the staff “don't care” and you shouldn’t either.

I will NEVER return to the Xfinity Theater and encourage you to do the same and vote with your wallet.