Coachella 2027. Two weekends in the desert, with a car waiting for you after the last set.

Everything at Empire Polo Club runs off a numbered lot on a numbered avenue, and the numbers matter more than the map does. The general pick up and drop off point sits at Avenue 52 and Madison, by the toll booths at the car camping entrance. Rideshare works out of a separate lot at Avenue 49 and Monroe, open late into the night and slowest between midnight and half past two. Preferred parking enters from Avenue 49 and Monroe as well, and closes to new arrivals at ten in the evening. Day parking runs from late morning until two in the morning and vehicles left after that are towed. Pedestrians are not permitted on Monroe between Avenue 49 and Avenue 52 at all, which catches out anyone who assumes they can be dropped nearby and walk the last stretch.

The festival also runs an application based pass for black car and limousine drop off and staging, with its own entrance and its own hours from Friday to Sunday, and a fee set by the festival. It has to be applied for well in advance and it is not granted automatically. Tell us early if you want us to work to it, because the alternative shapes the whole evening: without it, the car meets you at the public drop off and you walk in with everyone else.

This is the part worth planning and the part nobody plans. The main stages finish around midnight and the field empties into a small number of two lane desert roads with one set of traffic lights every mile. Car parks release slowly, the rideshare lot backs up past two in the morning, and a journey that took twenty minutes inbound can take well over an hour going the other way. Multiply that by three nights and by two weekends and the difference between a plan and no plan is several hours of standing in a dark field.

What a car and driver held for the night gives you is not a private road. It is a fixed meeting point you agreed in daylight, a driver already staged nearby rather than summoned from the queue, somewhere to leave a jacket and a bag, and the choice to sit out the worst of it in comfort instead of on a verge. April days in the valley are hot and the evenings drop quickly, so the car doubles as the cloakroom nobody booked.

London to Los Angeles is a long westbound sector of roughly ten to eleven and a half hours, inside the range of an ultra long range jet and often a fuel stop for a heavy jet. From there the valley is either a two and a quarter to three hour drive on a clear day, a short hop in a light jet or turboprop into Thermal or Palm Springs, or a helicopter transfer if the weather and the timing suit.

The alternative is to plan the whole thing into the desert directly, with the aircraft repositioning while you are there rather than sitting on a ramp for four days. Parking at the valley fields is finite and both festival weekends are well known to everyone who flies privately in California, so this is settled in January and February, not in April. We arrange the aircraft, the handling and the ground. See private jet charter, group charter and helicopter charter.