The Brixham Pirate Festival 2025 choose Mapzest for their interactive festival map
The annual BPF (Brixham Pirate Festival) is a swashbuckling event that takes place in Brixham, Devon, over the Early May Bank Holiday weekend. It's a free, family-friendly festival with a mix of music, street performers, pirate re-enactments, and activities for all ages. The festival is known for its festive atmosphere, with the town filled with pirates in costume and a lively celebration of all things piratical.
BPF collaborated with Zest4 to create an interactive festival guide delivered on the Mapzest Tourism platform.
The Requirement
Offline functionality (with around 60k pirates, signal can be testing)
Event listings covering all music stages over the 3 days
Listings for festival sponsors
Listings for market traders
Filters including Traders, Food & Drink, Events, Children Activities
General map point of interests, e.g. toilet facilities
Marketing campaign to accompany the guide
A map was created on Mapzest specifically for the festival. Map content was uploaded via Google Sheets, automatically creating the map listings. Each listing contained information about their stall, business or event, including call-to-actions for visiting their social channels and websites or to reserve a table. The app allowed visitors to plan ahead ensuring they were at the right stage at the right time to see their favourite artists. Visitors could browse and get directions to the various food and drink providers and gain visibility of everything that was taking place over the 3 day festival.
Screenshots of The Brixham Pirate Festival map on Mapzest
For The Trader
Mapzest provided an interactive way for traders to promote their wares and to raise awareness of their offering. With call-to-actions, a listing could have a ‘book now’ link, a ‘visit our webshop’ link or a ‘listen on Apple Music’ link to highlight a few. The map was given a pirate feel with imagery, fonts, colour scheme and category names to reflect the event.
For The Visitor
Browse all traders
Browse Pubs and Food venues
View everything on a list and via a map, with distance visibility and directions
View all events at the different stages
Find conveniences and their way around
Gain access to traders ecommerce stores and social channels
Reserve tables at the various listed restaurants
Research and plan who to see ahead of the event
Get live updates throughout the event
Use the app after the event as a directory for trader website, social and contact details
The Campaign
To raise awareness of the map, Zest4 provided a marketing campaign to accompany the app, producing signage complete with QR codes, delivered on-foot to venues, traders and posted around Brixham. Social channels were also used to help raise awareness.
A couple of festival pirates holding campaign signage
BPF 2025 Go-live
A quick turnaround was achieved with the majority of content being uploaded within minutes, this was helped by Mapzest’s ability to import content to quickly create listings in bulk. The job that takes the most time is collating the information of who is exhibiting and sponsoring, but usually with an event like this, the information has already been obtained so creating a map on Mapzest can be quick and simple. With Mapzest already live on the various app stores, there were no concerns trying to get app approval ahead of the festival. The BPF map became available on both iOS and Android for immediate download as soon as the map was set as published.
Zest4 are very much looking forward to working with BPF next year to deliver an even more immersive experience delivered on the Mapzest platform for the Brixham Pirate Festival 2026.
If you are looking for a tried and tested interactive guide for your festival, resort or location, that also works off-line, take a look at Mapzest and get in touch.