The tens of thousands in Hawke’s Bay this weekend for Robbie Williams’ two Mission concerts will be met with a well-tested array of steps tried over the years to improve the experience.
Scanners will log in up to 25,000 on each of Saturday and Sunday, with barcode and QR codes from online booking, possibly the biggest single factor in improving the experience since the teething days following the late 1992 announcement that an outdoors concert would be held the following January 23, and that it would be headlined by opera diva Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.
People took the day off work to queue from pre-dawn for tickets when they first went on sale, and on the day would queue with chilly bins full of booze and food, and trollies carrying other necessities such as rugs, cushions and other necessities of living the day and evening in a pop-a city in a paddock the size of a few rugby fields.
Few would have envisaged that it would become an annual event, even twice-annual, almost 31 years later, unless, maybe they were part of the strategy – the Mission statement – which was essentially writ on the label on the bottle - The Kiri Concert, at the Mission Estate Mission Estate Chardonnay 1992.
Why the patrons keep coming back, some from afar, comes back to the appeal that evolved, with Mission Estate CEO Peter Holley, who came on board in 1996 and has been at every Mission Concert since, saying there will be patrons who have been to almost every one.