Coachella is a huge nightmare if you haven't been there before and aren't experienced with it.
Here are the various issues:
- Expensive to stay there, including camping. Your best bet is to book a hotel WAY in advance (like nearly a year).
- Traffic is horrendous and parking prices are crazy. They have since introduced a shuttle service to get people from town into the event, but even that costs $50.
- Tickets are $349, and rising every year. Even with those prices, it sells out ridiculously fast (this year it's already sold out as a result of the pre-sale), and then you have to pay a premium through scalpers.
- It can be very hot there. Last year wasn't, but it's very close to Palm Springs, and April temperatures are frequently over 100 there.
- Huge crowds, obviously.
The pre-sale this year was a huge clusterfuck. The site selling the tickets (Front Gate, which isn't nearly as experienced as TicketMaster) crashed, and then when it finally went back up, it was super buggy and had all kinds of issues. It also screwed people waiting in the queue, as you could actually open up another browser and get in line "again" and actually somehow get ahead of your window that was there first. So I just opened up a tons of windows and some of them got through. They also had a bug that enabled people to purchase a lot more tickets than they were supposed to.
The general sale happens on Tuesday, and I predict the same fiasco.
Also what's LOL is that they sold out all of the Week 1 tickets at the pre-sale, which is pretty ridiculous. They should have held some back for the general sale.