BREAKING NEWS JULY 16, 2010 3:45 PM PACIFIC TIME - SOURCES TELL US THAT SWINGFEST 2010 HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY CANCELLED. 

With the demise of Lifestyles Tour and Travel the large scale Swingers Convention, pioneered by Robert McGinley, seemed to be a thing of the past.  Then Jason Jean and his group came to the rescue. Jason developed the concept of SwingFest and in July 2008 held the first SwingFest Swingers Convention.  Despite the skeptics, there is no question SwingFest 2008 was a rousing success, at least from the perspective of the attendees.  Yes, like any new event there were operational glitches, but the scale of SwingFest 2008 was above and beyond any other swingers convention.  Some 6,000 or more attendees ate, drank, partied and played away for three days at the Westin Diplomat Hotel in Ft. Lauderdale Florida.

Jason not only proved he could put on a large scale swingers convention, but he was also able to get more exposure for SwingFest than perhaps any other swingers event has garnered.  The SwingFest Internet presence was far reaching, but Jason also managed to get coverage in the main stream media and it seemed everyone was talking about the SwingFest.

So it was strange that after the success of the SwingFest in 2008, that SwingFest 2009 was changed from July, to October.  Rumors abounded that while SwingFest 2008 had been a success from the public’s perspective, it is was not economically viable, and the organizers had lost a lot of money.  For whatever reason, SwingFest seemed to lose momentum during its second year.  People wondered if the event would happen.  But it finally did.   Unfortunately it was not SwingFest 2008.  The crowd in 2009 was significantly smaller than in 2008.  We don’t know the exact number, but Dream Pleasure Tours was at both events, and based on the traffic we saw in the exhibit areas, at the pool, and at the parties, the SwingFest 2009 clearly was only a shadow of SwingFest 2008.

During this time Jason tried to brand SwingFest into something more than just an annual swingers party. There was talk of a SwingFest national bus tour and a SwingFest reality TV show.  It seems the bus tour never got off the ground and we’re not sure about the TV show.  But the decision was made to hold SwingFest 2010 and this time the location was set for Orlando Florida, and the event was moved back to July.

Although we made the decision not to go to SwingFest in 2010 (we do a lot of events every year and unfortunately we only have so many resources and cannot do them all, as much as we would like to) we were supporting the event.  We had it up on our events page, and we generate a great deal of traffic for SwingFest.  We even had a number of our customers book to attend SwingFest 2010.

Then, in June, we started to get phone calls.  Apparently customers could not get hold of any one from SwingFest. Phones were not being answered and emails were not being answered.  One of our lifestyle detectives called the Ramada in Orlando, only to find out that the SwingFest contract with the resort had been cancelled, apparently for non-payment of amounts due under the contract.

In late June, with the event schedule to happen only six or seven weeks in the future, there were rumors that SwingFest 2010 would be cancelled altogether.  We managed to speak with one of the organizers of SwingFest who informed us that the contract with the resort had been intentionally allowed to lapse due to a dispute with the resort regarding the consumption of alcohol.  We don’t know all of the details, but we were told that negotiations were well under way to hold the event at another resort and indeed it was announced that SwingFest 2010 would be moving to a new location.  Then, breaking news.  With only days to go, apparently fences were mended with the original resort and the event is schedule to happen back at the Ramada.

Meantime, the level of frustration by people who deemed SwingFest less than responsive during this period continued to grow. One of our associates, who planned to attend SwingFest as an exhibitor had an ongoing series of communications with SwingFest trying to find out what was happening, and the communications were poor enough that our associate threatened to pull out of the event.  At that point he received an email from one of the SwingFest organizers that states, “I'm done dicking around with you!... It's about running you into the dirt for being a jerk off!”

As a final development, we had been informed that SwingFest has been sold. However it turns out that the sale did not go through, apparently because of the cancellation of this year's SwingFest.

SwingFest 2010 was scheduled to begin on July 22, 2010. As noted at the top of this article, Swingfest 2010 has now been cancelled. It will be interesting to watch to see if there will be another SwingFest in the future.

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