Update 14/06/2018: Will no longer be attending this year’s Fieldays, everyone who had expressed interest to attend Fieldays with me have all since pulled out. Not worth me driving down there alone from Auckland.

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Noticed that the Incorporated Society behind the National Fieldays has increased the Adult ticket price for this Year for those booking online via Stream Ticketing from $20.00 per Adult (+$5.00 booking per transaction) to $30.00 per Adult (+$0.90 booking fee per ticket). This represents roughly a 50% price increase over the preceding year if taking the scenario of booking online for a group of 4-5 together.

The Door price increases from $25.00 to $30.00. Essentially they’ve removed the discount you get for booking online (with the door price now the same as the online price)

If it’s your first time attending and / or involved with the Rural sector, particularly those who are involved with Agri business or the Agricultural Sector, then at $30.00, it’s still worth going. However, for myself combined with being a townie (I’m an office bound I.C.T type) who has been a few times before, the value proposition perhaps tends towards the expensive side as my experiences each year that I have attended have remained pretty much the same.

This is Not in anyway intended to devalue the immense effort of the many involved with helping to organise and put together the event, many of them are volunteers who have freely offered their time to help out the event to ensure things run as smoothly as possible (through helping direct parking, offer assistance to visitors, helping with setting up, etc).

I will still look to attend this year, but may leave future Fieldays visitations to those years which have something substantially new to see and experience. For others, Unless you’re in the Rural Sector and are attending Fieldays for Agri-business matters such as to inspect and purchase equipment, evaluating products and services, cutting deals, gather info, etc.  Attending with the sole primary intention of taking the family out to shop consumer goods, particularly if you are from outside the Waikato region, may be false economy. (There’s only so many of those “dime a dozen” fleece clothing box packs you can buy, which I often see entire families walking out with at the end of Fieldays)