San Jose taco and beer festival postponed following backlash from San Francisco event
SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) -- 7 On Your Side has learned that "Blue Stream Entertainment," organizers of the West Coast Taco and Beer Festival have postponed their event Labor Day weekend at History San Jose.
This comes after our reporting on the same event in San Francisco last weekend.
"People are jokingly comparing it to the Fyre festival," Susie Tanamly, a San Francisco resident said.
The event promised unlimited taco samples and bottomless beer tastings, but attendees say, that isn't what they got.
RELATED: San Francisco taco and beer festival organizer accepting refund requests after community blowback
Tanamly paid $96 for one VIP ticket.
"I would love to know where the money from the tickets, where did it go?" she said.
And Catalina Reyes says even the vendors had no idea samples even were part of the deal.
"He said they told us when we got here this morning that we were supposed to provide free taco samples and we don't have enough and we didn't prepare for that," Reyes said.
So many complaints have been pouring in about the San Francisco event, Yelp disabled the comments while they investigate.
The event organizer told ABC7 he is accepting refund requests.
RELATED: Underwhelming experience at SF taco and beer festival leaves attendees calling for refunds
But when Reyes reached out in the Facebook comments on the event page, she got asked for information she wasn't comfortable giving.
"They said send us your registration information and your cash app," she said. "And then they said, ok well, to get your money back, we need $30 to verify the payment."
"I have first-hand seen fake customer service accounts pop up on social media," Melanie McGovern, a spokesperson with the Better Business Bureau said.
McGovern with the BBB she says these kind of events happen nationwide and consumers should be wary.
"It's really important to do those checks, if the account has maybe three followers or it looks brand new or there's not a lot of activity, they're claiming they can help you if you send them a personal message with your information, those are the big red flags of fake customer service online," she said.
As for the event itself, she's urging people to file complaint online with the BBB to warn others.
"If they do believe that a company isn't acting properly that they want to file that complaint to get their money back, the best way to do that is to file a written complaint with us so we can open a file and see what's going on," she said.
The organizer, Brandon Mozley, of Live Free Events and Blue Stream Entertainment issued this statement about postponing the San Jose event:
"To Our San Jose Community,
Due to the overwhelming amounts of feedback we received with our SF event, at this time we have decided to postpone our event to a later date this year. We here at West Coast Taco and Beer Festival want to make sure that we are providing an amazing experience for all of our attendees and we are working on improvements to the future San Jose event.
We will update everyone once we have our new date confirmed, and will be reaching out to current ticket holders for the next steps and refunds. Any questions related to the San Jose event can be sent to westcoasttacobeerfestival@gmail.com .
We greatly thank the community of San Jose who has continued to support us and attended our previous event earlier in March.
West Coast Taco and Beer Festival."
