A Day in the Festival Life of Box Office Manager
Ever wonder what happens behind the scenes at The Bath Festival? While the festival would have been happening, we’re sharing a series of articles from our festival team and partners to give you some insight into what goes on to make the festival happen! Below is a day in festival life from Box Officer Managers, Gena Goldfield and Beverley Willbourne. If you are able to help the festival continue by donating please click here.
A festival day is always busy and starts early. We arrive at Bath Box Office and make sure everything is ready for the day. We run pop-up box offices at each venue throughout the city, so we need to ensure that each venue has a float, laptop and chip & pin machine ready to go. We then start the mammoth task of printing the tickets for collection and various reports for each event that day, spreading out across the whole of the office and multiple desks!
Once we have briefed our brilliant Box Office Assistants, they head off to their respective venues ready to sell tickets and help with any queries you may have. Our job is then to coordinate the day and ensure everything runs smoothly. This can usually see us running from venue to venue, troubleshooting, getting more change, covering lunch breaks, serving customers at our counter in the Visitor Information Centre, or assisting our Box Office Assistants. It is always incredibly busy and we certainly run on adrenaline, but there is such a lovely festival atmosphere it is great to be a part of.
Where possible we try to catch 10 mins here and there of some of the inspiring and varied events on offer. Beverley is a fan of the literature events, while Gena once made a mad dash across the city to say hello to Tom Fletcher! A particular highlight for us both was dancing with Anton du Beke on the final night!
Above image: Beverley Wilbourne (left) and Gena Goldfield (right) dancing with Anton Du Beke when he came to the festival in 2018
A typical festival day ends for us after the last event has started and we have closed down all the pop up Box Office’s across the city, usually around 9.30pm. We then head home and try to get an early night so we are ready to do it all again the next day (with the exception of the Finale Weekend where we get a chance to let our hair down…on the Sunday at least)! The Bath Festival is always one of the busiest times of the year for us, but also never fails to be a fun and fabulous event-filled (and eventful) time in our calendar.
Gena Goldfield and Beverley Willbourne,
Box Office Managers
We need you help so we can continue to bring the best of music and books to Bath through The Bath Festival and Bath Children’s Literature Festival, as well as our all year-round creative learning outreach programme. Please donate to our #BackBathFestivals crowdfunder campaign.
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