Live music fans holding tickets to the cancelled 2020 KAABOO Music Festival will have to wait another year, as organizers announced this week that they wouldn’t return until 2022.
“For those ticket holders holding tickets from the COVID cancelled 2020 weekend previously scheduled at Petco Park, your ticket allocation remains intact and will be honored at the returning KAABOO San Diego,” organizers said. “We appreciate the ongoing support and patience of 2020 ticket holders as we undertake the preparations for the 2022 return of KAABOO San Diego.”
When last year’s event was cancelled due to ongoing restrictions on event attendance due to COVID, plans had been for a return in September of 2021. But besides a brief Facebook post in May that told fans to “stay tuned for exciting news and announcements coming soon via social and email,” no word had come regarding plans for the event’s return.
The conspicuous absense of any follow-up to that post left fans wondering what was going on, particularly those who had let festival organizers hang on to their cash from the 2020 festival, with promises of free additional tickets to the return event.
“I hope they announce something soon because they just really haven’t,” ticket-holder Matthew Keough told CBS 8 recently. “They left everybody in the dark. They ghoested the entire community.”
The announcement of the festival return being pushed back was not accompanied by any details surrounding the reasons for the delay. Other live events have already begun returning, including in California. Bottlerock Festival, featuring Foo Fighters, Guns N’ Roses and more, is set for Napa on September 3-5. Outside Lands is set for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in late October. Hard Summer is returning even sooner, with Future and DJ Snake headlining its return to San Bernadino on July 31-August 1.
Under previous ownership, the KAABOO festival has hosted acts including REO Speedwagon, Dave Matthews Band, Duran Duran, and Sheryl Crow at Del Mar. KAABOO’s former Chief Marketing Officer, Jason Felts, said in a news release Monday that he “looks forward to attending the event as a spectator and watching key members of my former team do what they do best.”
At the postponement of the 2020 KAABOO event, consumers were given the option of a full refund or hanging on to their tickets (with bonus additional tickets) for the 2021 event. It is not clear whether those who hung on to their tickets will have another period to request a refund if they are no longer interested in waiting.
