How Tourists Cause Overcrowding: Avoid This On Saturdays
Here’s what everyone can do to prevent another closure of the festival grounds.
In 2025, there was an unusual incident in which the festival grounds were closed due to partial overcrowding. In this article, we don’t want to focus on how poorly that situation was handled at the time, but rather on how each individual can help prevent it from happening again in the future. To attract attention to this important topic, we chose a provocative title. Tourist-bashing is not its goal.
Avoid Saturdays
Anyone who isn’t familiar with Oktoberfest at all might get the impression that they have to visit on a Saturday to get the full experience. This assumption couldn’t be more wrong. If you’re thinking about the atmosphere in the tents, you’ll find it on every other day of the week as well. On Saturdays, the tents aren’t any fuller than on weekday evenings because they’re closed early to prevent overcrowding. You learn more about that in our beer tent forecast.
And that’s exactly why Saturdays are actually a surefire way to miss out on the full experience—because you won’t even get a glimpse inside the festival tents. At least not after noon, as shown in our beer tent forecast. Anyone who tries to get in early in the morning and even manages to snag a seat still has the disadvantage of not being able to even catch a glimpse of any other tent, because all the doors will be closed while people are moving from one tent to another. First-time visitors would therefore only be able to see a tiny fraction of the Wiesn. Even those who just want a beer can find Saturdays frustrating. On particularly busy days, it’s actually quite possible that even the beer gardens will be cordoned off as the afternoon wears on. And without a seat, you won’t get any festival beer.
Anyone who still comes on a Saturday is well advised to avoid the Theresienwiese subway station and instead use one of the numerous alternative ways to get there.
Under No Circumstances Should You Line Up in Front of the Beer Gardens
And that brings us to last year’s problem: On Saturdays, the proportion of out-of-town visitors is higher than on any other day. Strangely enough, this even applies to those who’ve travelled a particularly long way—people who take time off work for their trip anyway but still consider Saturdays the perfect opportunity for their first visit. The first Saturday, for example, has now become “American Saturday,” much like “Italian Weekend.”
These visitors are generally poorly informed—otherwise, they would have planned their visit for a different day. When the beer gardens close, many of them line up in front of the main entrances, forming crowds there. These crowds lead to a narrowing of Wirtsbudenstraße, especially where the entrances face each other on either side—that is, between the Löwenbräu and Paulaner tents, Bräurosl and Schottenhamel, as well as the Augustiner and Hacker tents. And where the street is only one-third as wide, the crowd—which actually wants to move in both directions—eventually becomes so dense that it could potentially become dangerous.
Queuing on Wirtsbudenstraße must therefore be avoided. It simply makes no sense for individual thirsty patrons either. Most beer gardens have more than one entrance from Wirtsbudenstraße—several on the south side and a rear entrance. The main entrance is always the first to close and the last to reopen, if at all. After all, it’s closed to reduce the influx of people without shutting down completely.
So if the main entrance is closed, it’s worth checking the other entrances. Because many people don’t do this, crowds regularly form in front of the main entrances, even when access is easily available just 30 meters away. So under no circumstances should you line up on Wirtsbudenstraße. You won’t be able to get in there, and at the same time, you’ll be jeopardizing safety at the festival grounds. If everyone follows this advice, a situation like the one last year is extremely unlikely to happen again in the future.
