Ensure you make reservations early. Use the park and ride and take light weight folding chairs. Do not use the general parking, it is mass chaos. The organizers and the local police department definitely need to review how they handle things. We were in line for an hour and 15 minutes and then were not allowed to turn into the parking lot but told to go forward with no one past that point to direct us where to go. Balloons were fantastic!!!

Watch the news nightly; they usually know if the balloons will fly in the morning. Do the park and ride; it's well organized with several locations for take off.

This hotel is close to the balloon fiesta park and we had very little traffic on the way there!

Balloon Festival main reason for trip. Saturday morning activities cancelled due to weather, not much to do at park during the day. Sunday was perfect, all went according to plan for lift off. But not enough to do to stay a full day at the park. Traffic made it difficult to plan other trips as I relied upon LYFT for transportation so unable to visit other sites for activities.

We got the Park and Ride deal. We arrived at the mall to get on our bus at around 4:00am. We were stuck in line and waited, standing, for about 1:30 hours. It was ridiculously crowded and exhausting to go that early. The dawn flight was beautiful, but I was disappointed the few that took off at that time were all ad balloons that were ugly. It would've been so much more beautiful and worth me getting up super early for it if the balloons were prettier to measure up with the beautiful lighting at dawn. Then the mass ascension was cancelled even with cleared up sky. We were upset they did not have a way of letting us know, so we were just sitting there waiting for the mass ascension for 2 hours just to know it got cancelled. They could coordinate things better by installing more announcement speakers all over the event area so they can announce their cancellations and not waste our time, to help the bus rides go smoother/faster (the buses and the traffic control staffs seemed confused/lost with what they were doing), etc. They could also sell mats or outdoor chairs to be considerate of foreign tourists. Our confirmation email also stated they'd refund if the show got cancelled due to weather, but when we asked the information booth at the event, one seemed clueless and another just coldly told us they will not refund us, saying the dawn ascension did happen. Nowhere in the email was that made clear and it felt very unfair to us. We couldn't use the ticket the next day.

Great museum, did not have enough time to finish exploring.