Tomorrowland gets green-light for three-weekend festival in 2022

The organisers of Tomorrowland have been given the go-ahead to stage a three-weekend summer event next summer.

Plans to extend the event from a two-weekend festival to three weekends were drawn up earlier this year, with Tomorrowland hoping to make up for lost time and meet demand following COVID-19-enforced cancellations in 2020 and 2021. 

In September, Tomorrowland spokesperson Debby Wilmsen told Het Laatste Nieuws that organisers “really have to do this to cushion the financial hangover” of the last two years. “Before COVID, there were no plans to start organising three weekends,” she added at the time.

An application was submitted to the municipalities of Boom, where the festival is held, and Rumst, as well as to Antwerp, citing “economic necessity to compensate for the cancellations” as an argument for why the festival should be able to go ahead for three weekends in 2022. Those in charge of handing out permits have now deemed the application as sufficient to extend the festival to three weekends.

“We are of course very happy with this,” said Tomorrowland spokesperson Debby Wilmsen, as reported by Knack Focus. “We can now get to work preparing three weekends. They will all fall in July. We will work in the same way as with two editions… with the necessary variations on the poster.”

At the moment, it’s expected that the three-weekend extension will only apply to 2022’s edition of Tomorrowland.

In order to obtain the necessary permits for the date extension, organisers have agreed to cancel the usual helicopter flights that take place alongside the event, and limit the length of the opening party celebrations. “These are points that have come from consultation with the neighbourhood,” Wilmsen said. “So we were aware of this and we will stick to those agreements.”

Before the summer festival next July, Tomorrowland Winter is scheduled to return to the French Alps in March, featuring Armin van Buuren, Paul Kalkbrenner, Kölsch and more.