The first weekend of Coachella is here, but some attendees have been struggling to get to the campgrounds because of terrible traffic — even waiting up to 12 hours to get to their campsites.
Held at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., the first weekend of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival takes place from April 11-13 and boasts headliners including Lady Gaga, Green Day, Post Malone and Travis Scott. The lineup of artists both renowned and up-and-coming will do it all over again the following weekend, from April 18-20. Excitement among some attendees caught in traffic, however, has been waning. Online, festival attendees are sharing their frustrations over the long wait times, with some even threatening not to return next year.
Yahoo Entertainment contacted Coachella for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
Some attendees planned to arrive early Thursday morning, thinking they would avoid heavy traffic on the way into the campgrounds. Instead, festivalgoers said they were forced to push their cars in line due to either running out of gas or their car battery dying.
A Coachella attendee named Liss described her car camping experience both “disappointing” and “extremely dehumanizing.” In a TikTok video, which was posted on April 10 and has more than 837,000 views, Liss said she showed up for the camping line at 3 a.m., and had been waiting in her car for 10 hours with no access to water or restrooms. By 1 p.m., she still hadn’t gone through security.
“It’s 100°F outside, people’s cars are overheating, they’re running out of gas. There are no bathrooms anywhere for us to use. There’s staff porta potties people are being denied access to. People have been waiting in their car for 10+ hours. People have literally been using the bathroom behind bushes like animals, and they paid over 600 dollars to be here,” she said.
The X account for Festive Owl, a website dedicated to sharing festival news, posted a message from a Coachella camper who criticized this year as having “the worst organization I have ever seen at a festival.”
Some attendees are even comparing Coachella 2025 to the disastrous Fyre Festival of 2017, when attendees were stranded in the Bahamas without basic necessities like food and water. Organized by convicted fraudster Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule, the festival was marketed as a luxurious experience on a private island — but failed to deliver on its promise.
“I’m starting to think this is the Fyre Festival,” a TikTok user by the name of Lara, who had been waiting 10 hours to get to the campsite, said in a video. “Coachella car camping or fyre fest 2.0,” said another.
Dante San Miguel, another Coachella attendee forced to endure long wait times, said he had been waiting in his car for over two hours without being told exactly where to go.
“People are just setting up their campsites in random spots, even though that’s for sure not where we’re supposed to be camping at,” he said in a TikTok video posted on April 10. “Last year it took us like 15 minutes to get to our camping spot. This year, there’s not a staff member in sight.”
Lex, another TikTok creator, shared a video showing her friend direct traffic because “Coachella is understaffed.”
Coachella ticket holder and on-site camper Leidy Nguyen wrote on TikTok that she suspects the car camping fiasco was as bad as it was because “the staffing was clearly low.” Nguyen was in line at 4 a.m. but didn’t get to the campground until 1 p.m.
“We had no one directing us once we got close to the campgrounds,” she wrote of Coachella’s first weekend. “I even saw a staff member get taken to the medic tent for dehydration. A couple of workers I spoke to were so disoriented and out of it, I was genuinely concerned.”
Nguyen acknowledged that while getting into car camping typically “takes a while,” a nine-hour wait in the desert with zero direction “wasn’t just frustrating — it felt dangerous.”
On the Coachella subreddit, veteran festival attendees have pointed out that the level of chaos just to get onto the campgrounds is atypical. One redditor called Coachella “the gold standard of how well a festival can be organized,” while another noted that this year’s car camping fiasco was reminiscent of 2010, when it took 12 hours to get to the campsite — but that it had been “smooth sailing since then.”
In an effort to avoid disastrous traffic in the desert, some Coachella attendees are forgoing the drive altogether — and are flying instead.
JSX, a public charter jet service, launched a limited-time “pop-up” flight from Burbank to Thermal, Calif., which is within Coachella Valley, starting at $399 each way. The intention, according to Ben Kaufman, the senior director of customer experience and corporate communications at JSX, is for festivalgoers to circumvent bumper-to-bumper traffic.
“JSX is pleased with the response to its pop-up flights between Burbank and Thermal,” Kaufman said in a statement to Yahoo. “Offering these pop-up flights is exactly what the JSX business model is primed for — to effortlessly connect people to the cultural moments they value most.”
But air travel isn’t a viable solution for everyone. Attendees who don’t have the money to fly are forced to contend with gridlock traffic.
While wait times headed into the desert and the campgrounds appear to have eased up, fans attending weekend two are wary of the car camping conditions they might encounter. With a week to go, they’re hoping that the festival will sort out its organizational issues by then.
