Christmas magic fell a little flat this week when a holiday drone show in the English town of Haywards Heath flopped, with the company behind the production suffering “technical difficulties.”
According to the BBC, the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Drone Show, put on by Lumina Sky Theatre, was advertised as a “state of the art production” with “600 LED drones.” Instead, families who traveled from far and wide to attend were disappointed when the final product contained just a fraction of the drones promised.
“I looked at the website and there were going to be 600 drones,” one attendee told the BBC. “I could only make out about 50 drones and the images that came up were very unclear. A lot of the parents were leaving after five minutes.”
After the fact, disgruntled parents took to social media to share their efforts to demand a refund. In one Facebook group, Sarah Monckton posted photos she took of the dismal show to demand her money back:
Though the event was supposed to last 25-30 minutes according to Lumina’s website, attendees told UK press it only lasted about 15.
“From the beginning, large numbers of drones were missing, which left huge gaps in the formations and made it nearly impossible to understand what the images were even supposed to represent!” one attendee wrote on social media, per The Guardian. “The ‘finale,’ the moment the entire audience was waiting for, didn’t even happen. Just a black sky.”
On top of an unintelligible performance — which cost some families “hundreds of pounds” to attend, according to The Guardian — guests were mortified at the state of parking lot, which Lumina had decided to charge a fee to enter at the last minute.
“It was that awful, it took us an hour to get into the car park, which wasn’t suitable, it was just a field,” one attendee told the BBC. “We were muddy, there were no signs, it was just awful.”
Horribly underwhelming Christmas events are becoming something of a holiday tradition in the UK. As The Guardian recounts, there’s been no shortage of previous blunders, including 2014’s “The Magical Journey,” a 90-minute “immersive experience” which guests likened to a “waiting area at an airport,” or 2019’s “Christmas Grotto,” in which parents had to spend over £2,000 at the store Harrods if their kids wanted any hope of seeing Santa.
And though it wasn’t technically a holiday event, few can forget 2024’s “Willy’s Chocolate Experience,” the iconic AI-generated fiasco that flopped like perhaps no family experience has before.
So while it sucks to waste your time and money on an event like this, families across the UK could consider it a rite of passage — a grand, muddy, tradition of Great Britain.
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