Oktoberfest 2026: The Recurring Super-Project Wiesn

Thanks to the temporary closure of the underground between Poccistraße and Goetheplatz, I've been cycling past the Theresienwiese for months now, getting a real-time update every morning on the progress of the beer tents and amusement rides going up. This year, everything kicked off a beat later than in previous years because for a moment, it looked like the 2026 Oktoberfest might simply not happen. What caused a shortness of breath and a spike in adrenaline not just around the regulars' pub table, but presumably also in the Events Division of Munich's Department of Work and Economics was a lawsuit over the allocation of the large beer tents. In project management terms, you'd call it an escalation.

As of today, however, nothing stands in the way of the 191st Oktoberfest opening on September 19, when Munich's Mayor Dominik Krause taps the keg at precisely 12 o'clock noon in the Schottenhamel tent. With a resounding "O'zapft is!" the team, and indeed everyone eager to enjoy the 5^th season of Munich, can raise a glass to the milestone they've just hit: Oktoberfest Opened.

Oktoberfest by the Numbers

Opening Day isn't the first milestone in this project and it won't be the last. The procurement and vendor-selection phase that preceded it received 954 applications, of which 478 vendors were approved for the 34.5-hectare festival grounds: 36 food and beverage operators, 243 fairground exhibitors, and 182 market and service vendors. Add another 109 applications for the Oide Wiesn (the traditional-style section) on its 3.5 hectares, with 45 vendors approved. So, this project is about far more than "just" the well-known 14 large and 21 small beer tents or the Devil's Wheel — whose legendary owner Betty Feldl, who has run the iconic ride ever since her husband's death in 1970, will this year be honoured with her portrait on the lid of the official Oktoberfest™ collector's mug.

Here's what the numbers actually look like:

• Around 6.5 million visitors who, last year over 16 days, drank 6.5 million litres of beer, generated 764 tonnes of waste, lost 4,500 personal items — all logged, stored, and returned to their owners by the lost-and-found — and quenched their thirst with some 130,000 litres of water from the free drinking fountains.

• Around 600 police officers deployed across the entire festival grounds, working alongside security staff, stewards, paramedics from the Bavarian Red Cross, and the municipal utilities crew to keep everyone safe.

• Over 50 cameras whose video feeds will, for the first time in 2026, be consolidated in a brand-new security control room at the Service Centre Theresienwiese (SZT), displayed on a 22-square-metre video wall and used by a 35-person team to manage the safety concept in real time.

These figures are just some of the project KPIs against which operations can be measured during the project lifecycle. In 2026, this will happen in real time for the first time, as crowd counts on the grounds are captured live, enabling proactive crowd management. From these numbers, lessons learned can be drawn for the next iteration of the serial project — Oktoberfest 2027.

Who Runs the Oktoberfest?

No, it's not Mayor Krause, and it's not the longest-serving tent tender, Wiggerl Hagn of the Löwenbräu. It's Dr. Christian Scharpf and his festival leadership team. He took over the role from his predecessor Clemens Baumgärtner in March 2025 and, together with division head André Listing, coordinates not just the core team but hundreds of external personnel. From late July, for instance, the Oktoberfest Construction Unit joins the effort, taking charge of measuring out the stand positions, erecting stalls and toilets, and carrying out maintenance work throughout the festival.

These are the tasks that visitors actually notice, unlike the work done during the procurement and vendor-selection phase mentioned above. And it was right in that invisible phase that two events carried far-reaching consequences for this year's planning and beyond: on the one hand, the escalation surrounding a Munich restaurateur's lawsuit against the large-tent allocation process, and on the other the overcrowding incident of October 3, 2025, an incident that forced the temporary closure of the grounds and left several people suffering panic attacks.

While the lawsuit is still being heard — a decision from Bavaria's highest administrative court is expected on October 16 — and the urgent injunction filed in June 2026 to block the tent allocation was denied, the tent setup could proceed in line with a project management stance we might call "go/no-go despite an open escalation." The lawsuit did, however, turn the allocation process itself into a project risk: the procurement-side rules with a points-based evaluation and the city council's approval procedure came under scrutinity, with the court setting the value in dispute at roughly €10 million per tent. The city, in its role as project controller, had to respond to an external legal risk while the project was still in motion. What reads like a bureaucratic footnote is, in reality, a textbook scenario: a stakeholder walks the formal escalation path all the way through, while the project team has to keep planning, keep building, and keep tightening the rules, without knowing how the final instance will rule.

Last year's overcrowding incident became the foundation for a revised and expanded safety concept for 2026. It will be after the firecracker salute at the Bavaria statue on October 4 that we can tell whether it goes down in the project management textbooks as a best-practice case study in lessons-learned management. But even now, it's fair to say that the events of 2025 weren't simply written off — they were systematically fed into the 2026 plan. AI-assisted cameras are being used to detect overcrowded zones in real time and redirect visitors before things get critical. A live density barometer on the oktoberfest.de website shows how busy things are right now, so you can tell at a glance whether your visit is going to be a pleasant stroll or a crush. The "How to Wiesn" campaign aims to use a range of incentives to spread visitors across the grounds. Beer tents will now start their brass band music at 11 a.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. on weekends to pull visitors in earlier, and the "10 Golden Rules" are designed to make for a more relaxed visit.

So the Oktoberfest operates under a clear governance structure. At the top sits the Wiesnchef (Festival Chief), Dr. Christian Scharpf, who carries overall responsibility. The Events Division of the Department of Work and Economics (RAW) — led by André Listing — acts as the delivery organisation, handling permits and day-to-day operations. The political level is made up of Mayor Dominik Krause and Third Deputy Mayor Verena Dietl, who presents the festival's highlights and holds the city's supervisory role. Police, the Bavarian Red Cross, and the fire brigade, together with designated representatives from the District Administrative Office (KVR), the RAW, and the Munich Municipal Utilities (SWM), form a Coordination Circle that functions as a steering committee — coordinating deployment planning and risk assessment, and making the calls when things go critical.

The Opening-Day Parades

But it's not just the Oktoberfest itself that needs organising. Highlights like the parades have to be planned in detail well in advance as standalone sub-projects running alongside the main one. That's the remit of the Festring München e.V. (Munich Festival Ring).

On opening day, the traditional Entrance of the Tent Tenders and Breweries takes place: carriages carrying the tenders of the beer tents, wagons belonging to the fairground exhibitors, and the decorated horse-drawn teams of Munich's breweries roll out of Sonnenstraße onto the Theresienwiese behind the Münchner Kindl (Munich's symbolic child figure) and the Mayor. Every year, the Festival Ring selects around 9,000 participants from Bavaria, other German states, and the wider region — traditional costume and music groups, sport and mountain marksmen, drum-and-fanfare bands, and flag wavers.

Then, at precisely 12 o'clock, the Mayor — in 2026 for the first time Dominik Krause — opens the Oktoberfest with the traditional words: "O'zapft is! Auf eine friedliche Wiesn!" ("It's tapped! Here's to a peaceful Oktoberfest!"). We'll see whether he's as deft with the mallet as his predecessor and manages to sink the tap into the stag with a single, clean strike.

What's New at the 2026 Oktoberfest

As with every serial project, the 191st edition of the Oktoberfest has its fair share of changes:

• Tent swap: Christine and Lorenz Stiftl take over the Paulaner tent; new for 2026 is "Bartl's Flösserstadl."
• Fibre optic cables in every tent for the first time: even the Oktoberfest has gone digital.
• New music start times: large tents may play from 11 a.m. on weekdays and 10 a.m. at weekends.
• New rides: "Shake & Roll," "Fisherman's," and the 42-metre-high "Chaos Pendel" (80 km/h).
• Accessibility: redesigned Feststraße 4, wheelchairs available for online reservation for the first time, and the introduction of the "Hidden Disabilities Sunflower" initiative.
• Lost-and-found relocated: the former lost-and-found in the SZT is being incorporated into the security centre renovation and can now be found at the German Museum Transport Centre.
• Anniversaries: 100 years of Hühnerbraterei Poschner (Poschner's Roast Chicken) and 90 years of the Willenborg family in fairgrounding.
• UNESCO: German fairground culture was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2026. Many of the families on the grounds have practised this craft for generations.

Because while innovation feeds our human appetite for something new, long-lived traditions build a sense of belonging. The oldest rides on the grounds date back to the 19th and early 20th centuries. Take the Hexenschaukel (the Witch's Swing) on the Oide Wiesn, for instance: The illusion swing came from the United States to Germany in 1894 and has been set up at the Oktoberfest every year since.

Or the Crinoline, in which visitors have been spinning gently round and round in sofa gondolas, accompanied by a brass band, since 1924 — more than 100 years in the saddle.

The Devil's Wheel and the Toboggan bring a spin to the tradition, and they've been doing so since the early 1900s. Even though the Devil's Wheel's figures had to dress a bit more modestly in 2026 — what passes on Pride Day apparently doesn't quite make the cut for the Oktoberfest — you can bet that won't stop visitors from piling onto the spinning platform in droves and clinging on for dear life against the centrifugal force. And the fact that the Toboggan is most fun to watch rather than ride, as people try to stand elegantly on the conveyor heading up but mostly end up flat on their backsides, has been a well-known truth since 1933.

And What Happens After We've Had our Last Maß?

Even after the final taps on October 4 at 11:30 p.m., when the traditional closing verse is sung — "Aus is und gar is, und schad is, dass's wahr is!" ("It's out and it's done, and what a shame that it's true!") — the Wiesn 2026 project is far from over: the Oktoberfest Construction Unit dismantles the entire site, the vendors are invoiced, the lost-and-found inventory is finalised, and the press report is compiled. And the lessons from those 16 days are already feeding into the planning for Wiesn 2027. As with every recurring project, it doesn't end with project closeout but closeout is the starting point for the next iteration.

This brief look behind the scenes of the Oktoberfest mega-project reveals that behind the seemingly effortless mix of a litre of beer and a Dirndl sits a serial project that has been evolving continuously since 1810. The 2025 overcrowding incident and the safety transformation that followed — from the new control room to the AI cameras — show just how powerful a professional lessons-learned culture can be: problems aren't brushed aside, they're translated into measurable countermeasures. And the seamless collaboration between the organising team, the Munich Municipal Utilities, the police, the Bavarian Red Cross, the tent tenders, the fairground operators, and countless other stakeholders is a model we can all take a leaf from when it comes to excellent project management, stakeholder communication, and teamwork.

Good luck with the project execution, Wiesn crew! The InLooxians can't wait to raise a Maß— Prosit der Gemütlichkeit!

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Sources

www.oktoberfest.de/en - The official website of the city of Munich for the Munich Oktoberfest on the Theresienwiese