The problem
Water Lantern Festival had grown into one of the most recognizable experiential events in the country. USA Today’s readers voted it the #1 Best Cultural Festival. With 1 million+ lifetime attendees and over 2 million lanterns launched since 2018, the scale of the operation had outgrown its original web infrastructure.
Running 175+ events across cities worldwide means a lot of moving parts: event listings that need to stay current, ticket sales that need to process reliably at volume, and a website that needs to make the experience feel as magical before the event as it does at the event itself.
What we built
HQ built a full event management and ticketing platform integrated into the festival’s website. The system handles the core loop: browse events by city, check available dates, buy tickets, get confirmation.
The homepage is designed to convert. It leads with the emotional pull of the experience, large imagery of actual events, reviews, and the atmosphere of a lantern launch, and gets visitors into the ticket flow without friction.
Each event listing page is structured around purchase intent: date, location, pricing, and a direct path to checkout. The backend that powers the listings is built to scale, adding a new city or updating event details doesn’t require a developer.
Event search and blog
The event search surfaces all upcoming festivals by location so potential attendees can find the one closest to them. Pricing is surfaced early in the flow so users aren’t surprised at checkout.
The integrated blog handles content marketing, event updates, lantern decorating guides, and post-event coverage, giving the site depth beyond the transactional pages.
Knowing what a ticket buyer did
Checkout is instrumented end to end. A purchase records the ticket type and the amount alongside the buyer, and ambassador codes and discount codes are tracked with it, so the festival can tell which partner or which promotion actually produced a sale.
The site also runs a Canadian domain beside the American one, with city level redirects mapping the old pages onto their new homes, so a link somebody saved years ago still lands on the right event.
The pages that came after the platform
Once ticketing worked, the site kept growing. We added a newsletter section the festival named The Glow, a blog, a meditations page, a yoga page, and a guide to decorating your lantern.
The events themselves are created by the festival’s own team in the CMS. That is what lets 175 cities stay current without a developer in the loop.
Things you can look up
The lantern is patented. US Patent 10,711,959 B2, “Multi-tiered floating water lantern,” granted July 2020.
Tickets start at $24.99 and rise to $79.16 as an event fills. The site carries a page for every city the festival has run in, 241 of them as of September 2026, which is the catalogue the search has to stay on top of. The company is BBB accredited with an A rating.
