This weekend the fifth edition of the Lollapalooza Festival Berlin was organised. The festival is originally from the USA and the first edition was organised 28 years ago. Since five years the festival also takes place in Berlin and after editions at Airport Tempelhof, Hoppegarten and Treptower Park it has been taking place in the Olympiastadion since last year. In this review of Lollapalooza we provide you with plenty of photos, some of the highlights and tips for people who want to visit Lollapalooza next year.

Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 - Rita Ora
Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 – Rita Ora

Lollapalooza Berlin 2019

With headliners like Twenty One Pilots, Kings of Leon, Scooter and Martin Garrix the expectation were high for Lollapalooza Berlin 2019. In the end 85.000 people visited the festival per day. This is a massive amount of people, especially if you keep in mind that other large German Festivals like Fusion and Melt have not more than 60.000 visitors. The numbers prove how popular Lollapalooza is. We’ve met people from all over the world who flew to Berlin just to be part of this great event.

Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 - Swedish House Maffia
Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 – Swedish House Maffia

Year over year improvements

We have been visiting 4 of the Lollapalooza festivals in Berlin and it is great to see that the festival gets better year over year. From getting home easily to the amount of toilets and from places to drink water to the sound-quality: It is good to see that many issues have been improved over the years. On the other hand there is still room for improvement. In this Lollapalooza-review we wrote down the positive aspects and possible improvements for next year.

The Positive & Highlights

Let’s start this review with the good stuff. All in all there was plenty to enjoy on Lollapalooza Berlin 2019.

The Olympiastadion – Easy to get home
The biggest problem of the edition of 2017 in Hoppegarten was the transportation of the people after the festival: The trains were just not able to handle the huge amount of festival-visitors. Therefore the organisation had chosen the Olympiastadion as the new venue since 2018. Because a huge football-club (Hertha BSC) plays here every second week, all visitors were able to get home very fast.

High-Class acts
For most visitor a festival is mainly about the music. This years edition of Lollapalooza Berlin had plenty of awesome acts to offer: From DJs like Claptone, Martin Garric and Scooter to bands like Kings of Leon, The Coronas and Granada: We enjoyed the versatile music on Lollapalooza a lot.

Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 - Kings of Leon
Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 – Kings of Leon

…and plenty of entertainment
But a successful festival in the year 2019 should offer more than just music. Visitors were able to enjoy synchronised swimmers, get lost between hundreds of glitters, decorate your own hats and enjoy things like an art-corner, the Fashionpalooza and a sustainable part of the festival called Grüne Kiez. Also the Lolla Fun Fair was definitely worth a visit with performances of acrobats, actors and other enjoying creatures.

Lollapalooza Entertainment Berlin
Lollapalooza Entertainment during the edition of 2018

Enough toilets and food-stands
Three years ago, when the Lollapalooza Berlin festival was organised at the airport Tempelhof, there were not enough toilets. The guys were doing their thing anywhere they could and the girls had to stand in line for up to one hour. It is good to see that the Lollapalooza took this serious the last couple of years: In the Olympiastadion there were enough toilets and you did not had to stand in line longer than 5-10 minutes. The same goes for Food-Stands: There were plenty of food-stands all over the area of the festival.

Foodstands Lollapalooza 2018
Plenty of choice when it came to foodstands

Walking Bartenders
A great thing was that the organisation of Lollapalooza decided to send employees into the crowd to sell beers. They would have a container on their backs with 25 Liter of beer. This meant you would not have to go to the bar to get a new drink. Great initiative!

What still needs to be improved

Besides plenty of highlights and positive aspects of Lollapalooza Berlin 2019, this review also needs to point out some things which have to be improved. The organisation of Lollapalooza have to keep in mind that Festivals in the east of Germany are not that expensive most of the time. This means, that when you ask for 130-150 Euro for two days without camping, people have very high expectations and everything has to be organised near to perfectly. Although the festival is improving every year and taking feedback serious, there were still some problems during this years edition.

Want more reviews of German festivals? What about Melt Festival and Feel Festival ?

Make sure everybody can see the main-acts
In 2018 many people were not able to see the performances of Armin van Buuren and David Guetta. The Olympiastadion was full and they would not let people in anymore. This year people were also allowed to sit on the chairs of the Olympiastadion, which unfortunately did not completely solve the problem. There were still people who were not able to see the show of Martin Garrix on Sunday. If you bought a ticket just for Martin Garrix and you were not able to see him in the end, the festival was probably not a success from your perspective.

Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 - Perry Stage Hugel
Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 – Perry Stage Hugel

Have toilets in all sections of the Perry Stage
To make sure everybody had enough space to dance, the area inside the Olympiastadion (Perry-Stage) was divided into sections. A pretty good idea in general, but the toilets were only accessible in the third section. This meant that when you were dancing in the front (section 1) and you needed to go, you needed to wait to get back to your friends afterwards. Not a great experience.

Sound on the Perry Stage
Many people visit festivals mainly for the DJs. If you like electronic music yourself, you know that the sound is rather important. The quality and bass are two components which can make or break a performance. During most of the shows on the Perry Stage the music was too soft. There was no bass and therefore you were not able to “feel” the music. Maybe this was due to regulations but still it would be great if this could be improved for next year. Something like this has not happened at other festivals like Fusion, Melt or Wilde Möhre.

Lollapalooza 2019 Summarised

Although the things mentioned above might not have been optimal, Lollapalooza Berlin 2019 was a success altogether. The location, the acts and the atmosphere were lovely.

If the organisation can improve the main issues mentioned above, the sixth edition of Lollapalooza in Berlin is going to be an even bigger success. The festival will once again take place in the second weekend of September. If you want to keep up to date about next year’s edition, you can check the Lollapalooza Berlin website.

Author

My Name is Job and originally from the Netherlands. In 2012, a girl I met in Australia motivated me to move to Berlin. I love to share the best places, activities and events in Berlin with you on my blog.

6 Comments

  1. There is a free watertap at the Lolla Kids Area but you have to walk quite far to get there. And it’s seems that there is another one somewhere but I don’t know where.

    • Job Reply

      Hey Tia,

      Thanks for your comment and thanks for the tip.

      Yes I actually found some spots for free water yesterday as well. It was just not that easy to spot them.

      Hope you had a nice festival!

  2. There was no free water on festival. The 0.5l of bottle cost 4€. That is way too expensive.

    • Hi Janja,

      Thanks for your comment.

      There actually was one spot on the festival with free water but I think not many people knew about it.

      They should communicate that better in the next edition and maybe make sure there are spots all over the location.

      Have a nice day!

  3. Thanks for this review. I just have a question: did they have free water there last year? Because, according to the website’s FAQ’s:

    “Bringing any of the following onto the event site is forbidden: glass containers of any type, canisters, cans, PET bottles and/or other drink containers, your own food, rigid packaging, cooler bags, any other heavy containers. You may bring non-alcoholic beverages of up to 1.5 litres in Tetra Paks (One Tetra Pak per person) to the festival site.”

    Limiting people to 1.5 litres per person for a long, hot summer day is slightly stingy, if not dangerous… no?

    Source:
    http://www.lollapaloozade.com/en/faqs/

    • Hi Miss E,

      Yes there is free water on the festival. You were able to fill your bottle at one central spot on the location.

      Have fun!

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