Oktoberfest organisers warn of overpriced and fake table bookings

Fraudsters are offering dubious Oktoberfest table reservations online long before the festival begins, BR reports. The city of Munich and the festival’s tent operators are warning visitors to be cautious.

Suspicion is warranted when a table costs thousands of euros. Reservations themselves are free, as is entry to the festival tents. Guests must usually buy food and drink vouchers, typically for two litres of beer and half a roast chicken per person. Around 50 euros per person is generally enough for those vouchers.

That is far below the 1,730 euros an event agency once demanded for just six places, including food and drink, in a large tent. The case went before the Munich Regional Court, which ruled that buyers had been led to believe they were entitled to the seats after paying. They were not.

Most tent operators’ terms and conditions expressly state that reservations cannot be transferred. Reservations made through outside providers can therefore be cancelled, leaving customers who paid large sums unable to enter the tent.

Steffi Spendler, the landlady of the Löwenbräu tent, said staff are instructed to check whether the names on table signs match the guests. Some customers have also exposed the prices they paid themselves. Spendler recalled guests complaining that they had paid 1,800 euros for a table by the door. “The server naturally asks why they paid so much,” she said.

The tent operators now hire law firms to use web crawlers, automated computer programs that scan the internet for suspicious offers. Completely fake offers have also been used to take people’s money without providing anything in return. Recovering the money afterwards is often nearly impossible for those who were deceived.

Christian Scharpf, the Oktoberfest director, said the campaign against inflated table prices was showing results. In the past, a Google search for table offers produced “a whole string” of dubious listings. That was no longer happening on the same scale, he said.

Visitors are advised to book directly through the Oktoberfest tent operators or use the official booking and resale portal, oktoberfest-booking.com. People who can no longer attend can legally offer their reserved table and vouchers there. Other visitors can take them over in exchange or at the original price. More than 750 transactions were completed through the portal last year.

Visitors seeking a regular reservation three weeks before the festival, especially for a preferred evening at the weekend, will need some luck. Peter Inselkammer, spokesman for the tent operators and owner of the Armbrustschützenzelt, advises checking the tents’ websites regularly because cancelled reservations are repeatedly returned to the booking system.

Visitors can also find seats without a reservation. A certain proportion of tables cannot be reserved and is deliberately kept available for walk-in guests. In good weather, the beer gardens are another option, as they do not accept reservations.

The Oktoberfest is not cheap even without inflated reservation prices. Some devoted visitors consider it worth the cost and attend every day. One older man collecting food and drink vouchers for a Löwenbräu reservation joked that he and his companions spend two weeks “on holiday in the tents,” rather than taking another trip.