Shekara K

Crafty Con

I would like to lodge a complaint against David Huni and the Naomi gallery who were the organizers of the Christmas Brilliance and Market (Garden of Lights) event which took place in Stellenbosch last weekend, 15-17 November 2019 at the Jan Marais Nature Reserve. I would like to report them for fraud, endangerment and organized theft. The entire event was a scam and a money making racket. The organizers need to be held accountable for stealing from innocent and unsuspecting public who have fallen victim to a marketing con. I am so incredibly disappointed and angry and I feel robbed by this despicable event. I am utterly appalled. This event was an expensive waste of valuable family time and money. My partner and I bought early bird tickets to attend the Christmas Brilliance Market in Stellenbosch with his granddaughter as a treat. Despite having bought our tickets online we queued in excess of an hour to get into the venue itself, and then spent over another hour in a queue to enter the garden whilst being squashed among the hoards of people in attendance. The queues for the food vendors were no better and just as unpleasantly long - these long queues had a waiting time of over an hour as well; all for overpriced and unappetizing food vendors. It was an exceptionally horrible experience having dust kicked up in one's face and eyes with all the people shoving in the queues. In addition, it was a health and safety hazard. It was unsafe. The event was held in poorly lit conditions. There were inadequate ablution facilities. It was abundantly clear to me that the venue itself was in fact unable to accommodate the amount of people in attendance. The venue was clearly not suitable and had there been an emergency or a stampede, people would have been severely injured or worse. I am extremely dissatisfied, because after all the waiting, we did not get to see a single light. his event was poorly planned and executed. II feel that this entire exercise was a complete waste of time and money. The fact that we could not even get into the actual show venue, in my mind, is entirely unacceptable. I have emailed the email address listed on the events website to no avail - I have received no response to date regarding my request for a refund. I have also tried to call the two numbers listed on the social media page and have since been blocked after raising the above mentioned issues. Any and all negative feedback was deleted off their Facebook profile. I would like to point out that these specific organizers, David Huni and the Naomi gallery, have a track record of several disastrous events in the past and the consensus from countless bad reviews on social media as well as hellopeter.com is that they change the names of the event each time but the events are disasters anyways. They operate purely on a slick, fake social media marketing campaign, which is frankly, a lie.