A Honduras-based hotel owner says he’s reviving the Fyre Festival brand alongside Billy McFarland as a pop-up experience at his island resort, marking the latest twist in a bizarre saga.
Heath Miller, a former New York concert promoter and one-time manager of Webster Hall in Manhattan, says he reached an agreement with McFarland to stage a 300-to-400-person Fyre Resort Pop-Up at his hotel, Coral Villa Utila, located on the island of Utila, one of Honduras’ famed Bay Islands in the Caribbean. The event will run from Sept. 3-10.
Tickets are cheap: Just book a room at Miller’s 25-room resort, and a pass for Fyre is included. Rooms start at $198 per night for singles, $329 for couples, $399 for triples and $449 for the hotel’s four-bed room.
Miller is quick to point out that the September event is not being billed as Fyre Festival II, adding that tickets from that event won’t get you access to the Fyre Resort Pop-Up, which he says will be more low key than what had been planned for Fyre’s comeback festival in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. There will be live entertainment, although Miller notes that he hasn’t secured any talent yet and says the festival won’t have a large budget or a splashy lineup.
“This event isn’t for an artist looking for a $100,000 fee,” he says. “Honestly, for me, this is a promotional vehicle for my hotel and it plays into my grand plan — I’m working on writing a book on my music career, and the book was supposed to end last June [with a story about] Jack Antonoff in Asbury Park. But instead, I guess Fyre is going to be the final chapter of the book.”
In Miller’s estimation, the controversy around the disastrous 2018 festival — which garnered international headlines when ticketholders arrived on a Bahamian island to find that the promised luxury event had not been realized — may ultimately be the biggest draw.
“Fyre Festival is a tainted brand that obviously has a horrible reputation, but at the end of the day, this brand can create press and awareness better than Coachella can,” he says.
Miller has been managing the hotel since 2019 for his late father, who bought the island resort in the 1990s. He says his idea for the Fyre pop-up is partially inspired by Sixthman, the concert and cruise ships company owned by Norwegian Cruise Lines that stages music-themed cruises for artists like Lindsay Stirling, Joe Bonamassa and comedian Nate Bargatze.
“Originally, I wanted to do fan club and events here,” on Utila, says Miller, who hoped to match music with scuba diving and water excursions. He adds, “Fans want to engage with the artist in unique and different ways and see them play in unique settings,” noting that the Fyre pop-up presented a rare opportunity to build proof of concept.
Under the terms of their agreement, McFarland maintains full ownership of Fyre, and Miller will serve as venue manager and site host.
Miller says he’s already secured permits and local approval for the Fyre Resort Pop-Up and said he hopes the famed festival brand creates some positive buzz for Utila. The island is popular year-round with scuba divers and snorkelers who visit the island to swim with sharks and explore the 600-mile-long Mesoamerican Barrier Reef, but it isn’t as well-known as other Caribbean destinations like Barbados, St. Lucia, and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Miller adds he’s well aware of McFarland’s past failures with Fyre Festival, most famously with the disastrous first edition in 2018, which left hundreds of fans temporarily trapped on Grand Exuma island. McFarland masterminded the event, according to the FBI, convincing fans to shell out thousands for luxury accommodations that turned out to be emergency tents and gourmet meals that were little more than cheese sandwiches.
McFarland went to prison after admitting to stealing $26 million from investors for the event and has been working to repay them since being released from prison in 2022 after serving four years of his six-year sentence. While serving in solitary confinement, McFarland came up with the idea for a sequel to Fyre, which he had hoped would repair his image, and bounced around different sites in the Bahamas and Mexico before landing on Playa del Carmen near Cancun. McFarland ultimately hired Mexican firm Lost Nights to produce the event and staged a press conference on March 27 with local officials to highlight it.
However, things went south in April when city leaders from Playa del Carmen announced that no permits for Fyre Festival had been issued in the seaside town. McFarland responded by releasing images of permits that he said proved Fyre was happening, but he later pulled the plug on the event and refunded ticket holders. On April 24, McFarland announced he was selling Fyre’s assets and intellectual property and had reached an agreement with a streaming service to license the name.
Miller says McFarland retains the name for Fyre and has a core team of a half-dozen individuals working with him, including his long-time partner, Michael Falb.
“I’m well aware of Billy’s past and I think it’s important that we are transparent about what happened. I personally met with the mayor of Utila when securing the permits for this event and even showed him the documentaries about Fyre Festival,” Miller said of the films FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened and Fyre Fraud, both of which were released in 2019 and chronicled the festival’s rise and fall.
“Billy has issues and one of his biggest flaws is that he tends to trust people more than he should,” Miller says, noting that McFarland reminds him of himself when he was a young promoter working New York’s nightlife circuit as an independent concert promoter, both for himself and for John Scher’s Metropolitan Concerts and later Webster Hall. Miller notes he worked with McFarland prior to Fyre Festival, when McFarland was running millennial VIP company Magnises.
“He never stiffed me on a bill — we always got paid what we were owed,” Miller says. “I look at Billy’s mistakes and I ask myself what I would have done if I was controlling millions of dollars for a huge party. I don’t know. What I can tell you about Billy is that he a big kid at heart that really just wants to throw the world’s greatest party.”
To buy tickets and learn more visit fyrehotels.com.
