Community Corner
NJ Festival Of Ballooning Will Not Take Place In 2024
The largest summertime hot air balloon and music festival in North America had been held annually at Solberg Airport for the past 40 years.
READINGTON, NJ — The New Jersey Lottery Festival of Ballooning will not take place in 2024 after becoming an annual tradition for the past 40 years, announced organizers on Friday.
The event’s organizers, The Festival Group, made the "extremely difficult decision" to place it on a one-year hiatus "in order to reimagine, refresh and relaunch the next version of this great festival in 2025."
The hiatus is due to many factors branching from the 2020 pandemic including an exponential increase in operational costs, said longtime Festival Executive Producer Howard Freeman, whose company has produced the annual three-day festival the past 30 years.
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"Inflation, supply chain interruptions, vendors who went out of business during the pandemic, competition for scarce resources from festivals worldwide, along with drastically increased fees set by musical talent, make it extremely difficult to present a quality event in its current form without passing rising costs onto our guests," said Freeman.
Those same factors are being felt across the entire festival industry worldwide, according to event organizers.
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The largest summertime hot air balloon and music festival in North America, the New Jersey Lottery Festival of Ballooning, has been held annually for the past 40 years at Solberg Airport at 39 Thor Solberg Road in Readington.
To keep the tradition moving forward, event organizers are looking for "additional investors and partners who would benefit from the event’s name recognition, associated brand awareness, its global media coverage, highly coveted family demographics, and community giving, as part of its 2025 relaunch," said Freeman.
Freeman also thanked the New Jersey Lottery for their support.
"We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the New Jersey Lottery, who not only signed as our new title sponsor just as COVID was taking hold in 2020, but whose support has been unwavering and continues to this day," said Freeman.
For more information visit www.balloonfestival.com.
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