New Jersey Festival of Ballooning is Not Happening Next Year

The New Jersey Lottery Festival of Ballooning has been the largest summertime hot air balloon and music festival in North America. They've earned several accolades through the years. This includes being designated multiple times as a Top 100 Festival in North America by the A.B.A.

We have broadcast our show from the site of the festival many times through the years. It’s been held annually at Solberg Airport in Readington, New Jersey. Each year people from all over New Jersey and beyond traveled to enjoy the festival. It featured twice daily mass ascensions of up to one hundred specially shaped and sport hot air balloons. There's been concerts, family entertainment, hundreds of crafters and vendors, great food, fireworks, a balloon glow, and more.

According to their website, BalloonFestival.com, the 2024 New Jersey Festival of Ballooning has been canceled. Event organizers The Festival Group, have decided to take a year off and put the family festival on hold. They say that they plan “to reimagine, refresh, and relaunch the next version of this great festival in 2025.”

On their site festival Executive Producer Howard Freeman said, “Since we purchased the event back in late Fall of 1992, we have been proud to offer a first-class, family-oriented festival at reasonable prices. However, coming out of the 2020 pandemic, we have seen an exponential increase in operational costs. Inflation, supply chain interruptions, vendors who went out of business during the pandemic, competition for scarce resources from festivals worldwide, along drastically increased fees set by musical talent, make it extremely difficult to present a quality event in its current form without passing rising costs onto our guests,”, whose company has produced the annual three-day festival the past 30 years. “In order to properly address these challenges, we have made the difficult decision to take a one-year hiatus to reimagine and relaunch the festival in 2025.”

It is certainly sad to hear that this yearly family tradition will not be around next year. However, we can look forward to a bigger and better balloon fest come 2025.