Why 2023 Burning Man tickets are easier to get this year

Over the years, Shri Ganeshram has been known in his friend circle as the Burning Man Ticket Fairy, helping to secure hard-to-attain passes for those clamoring to attend the eccentric annual gathering in the Nevada desert. This year, however, Ganeshram, a Bay Area resident who’s been going to Burning Man since 2014, can rest his wings.

Burning Man tickets and parking permits are plentiful, which is creating significant buzz in Burner social media groups as hundreds of would-be attendees are trying to unload their tickets ahead of the event that runs from Aug. 27 to Sept. 4 this year. While it’s typical for a flurry of tickets to become available through resale channels in the days leading up to Burning Man, veteran Burners tell us 2023 has been remarkably different as resale offers have been plentiful for months and prices are equal or lower than face value.

If you’re looking for your own Burning Man tickets, event organizers say STEP is the only guaranteed way to safely buy or sell tickets outside of its regular sales.

So what’s with the glut of tickets? Burning Man organizers didn’t respond to our request for an interview on the topic before publication time, but there are several prevailing theories circulating among the community.

Burning Man was canceled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, so 2022 was a big homecoming year for the gathering. Ganeshram points out that a lot of people don’t go to Burning Man every year, meaning 2022, in a way, reset that cycle and led many Burners to take this year off.

This will be Ganeshram’s eighth year at Burning Man. A tech entrepreneur and DJ, he’s a camp lead with Discow at the desert congregation. His camp’s Mutant Vehicle is a giant cow with a disco ball, which he says will be at the center of some artistic experiences and partnerships throughout the gathering.

“The other thing… 2022 was the most savage year,” Ganeshram told SFGATE. He says the playa was exceptionally hot and the lake bed dried out early, creating dunes that made it harder for Burners to pedal around on bikes, the main mode of transportation at the event. Winds were also strong, causing delays and making it difficult for those who needed to use forklifts to install art. On top of that, Burning Man put limits on outside vendors, and many of the suppliers it used weren’t ready to scale after taking a couple of years off, causing more delays.

During setup, camp leads were pulling 16-to-18-hour days in 95-to-100 degree heat, according to Ganeshram.

“We made a joke that we went to working man instead of Burning Man,” he said.

He says he’s confident in the vendors he’s working with this year and expects conditions in Black Rock City to be better than they were in 2022. His team is excited to work less, have more fun and share art they’ve been working on for the past couple of years.

Black Rock City may be a bubble isolated from capitalism, where ice is the only thing for sale, but when you total up ticket sales, camp fees, transportation costs and the post-Burn auto detailing required to clean off the desert’s alkaline dust, the cost of attending Burning Man can easily add up to thousands of dollars.

Burning Man staggers its ticket sales, with most tickets costing $575 apiece this year for the entire event’s run. But the cost adds up once you factor in the $150 vehicle pass, Nevada’s Live Entertainment Tax, credit card processing fees and more. Two tickets plus a parking pass could run you close to $1,500. Facebook discussion threads detailing reasons why people aren’t going to Burning Man this year show that many Burners are more cash-strapped than they were in 2022, when ticket prices were the same.

While inflation has cooled to 3.2%, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, year-over-year inflation on the consumer price index reached a 40-year high of 9.1% in June 2022, which reduced buying power and likely shrunk fun budgets.

The Bay Area, where Burning Man originated on Baker Beach in 1986, remains a large feeder to Black Rock City. But the tech sector has been hit hard by layoffs in 2023, with 956 companies laying off more than 227,000 employees so far, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks the state of the industry. Tack on the high-profile strikes hitting the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, and you’ve got lots of would-be attendees who don’t have the money to Burn this year.

While a lack of spare cash may be keeping some from the desert, there are a smattering of other reasons why people have said they aren’t attending Burning Man this year.

For one, Labor Day is a big travel weekend and international travel has rebounded since the pandemic’s peak, and many Burners say they’ve got trips booked in other parts of the world eating up their budgets or overlapping with the late-summer gathering. Others are citing renewed health concerns, as new COVID-19 variants pose risks, especially for those who are immunocompromised.

Other reasons cited by would-be Burners include a change in lifestyle brought on by the pandemic baby boom, claims that Burning Man has been infiltrated by influencers and even complaints about the atmosphere of the current festival, specifically that there’s too much electronic music.

Linda Williamson — a longtime Burner from Los Angeles who first experienced the gathering in 1997 — won’t be making it to the playa this year.

“Last year’s Burn was hot and difficult, which is part of the trendline the Earth is on,” she said.

She also told us the gathering’s growth has made it a tougher sell.

“With exodus lines stretching 10 hours or more as a fairly common occurrence, you have to devote an entire day just to the process of getting to the pavement, and that commitment on the tail end makes getting back to the ‘default world’ even harder,” Williamson said.

The Black Rock Desert is large enough for the number of event participants to expand, but the two-lane road leading into and out of it, Nevada State Highway 447, isn’t getting any bigger. Even as tickets are plentiful, she says the Burner Bus system, only accessible to people without a ton of gear to carry, always sells out very quickly, essentially eliminating it as an option.

“I would love to be able to go, but I would also love to be able to leave,” she said.

This story was edited by Hearst Newspapers Managing Editor Kristina Moy; you can contact her at [email protected].