New Jersey Festival of Ballooning Festival Cancelled for 2024

The New Jersey Lottery Festival of Ballooning has been put on hiatus for 2024, the festival announced today.

According Howard Freeman, the longtime executive producer of the balloon festival, explained that the hiatus is due to financial reasons, and the festival will take a year off to “reimagine, refresh and relaunch the next version” of the event in 2025.

“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,” he said in a statement. “However, coming out of the 2020 pandemic, we have seen an exponential increase in operational costs. “

He continued: “Inflation, supply chain interruptions, vendors who went out of business during the pandemic, competition for scarce resources from festivals worldwide, along with 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. 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.”

The New Jersey Lottery Festival of Ballooning celebrated its 40th anniversary earlier this year. The event was held at Solberg Airport in Readington Township in Hunterdon County this past July.

The three day festival offered morning-through-night family entertainment with live concert that included KC and the Sunshine Band, Laurie Berkner, Motown legend Smokey Robinson, R5 featuring Ross Lynch from Disney Channel’s #1 series Austin & Ally, and rock and reality TV star Bret Michaels; fireworks; a nighttime hot air balloon glow where the balloons are lit up like lanterns; children’s amusement rides; age-appropriate activities and more.