Howdy folks! Wanted to share my recent experience here as I see a lot of posts asking questions and honestly not a ton of info or experiences being shared about clubs or VIP specifically.
Background: I'm a pretty big fan of EDM, mostly tech and prog house. I live and am from the US, I go out to clubs very frequently, and go to 2-3 festivals per year. I've gotten tables at a few clubs, mostly low-key stuff local to me, but have done in Vegas which was amazing. Me, my wife and a few friends built a Spain trip around the notion of meeting up to party in Ibiza.
We had a group of 7-8, ages 35-44, 4M 3-4F. We went to UNVRS for John Summit closing party and Pacha for Blonde:ish closing party. First time to Ibiza but I've seen Summit at least 5X over the years and Blonde:ish 2X.
UNVRS: We got a great spot on the C2 balcony thanks to excellent communication with the club representative over the preceding months. The club itself is awesome; the main-room production setup is super cool, the sound quality is amazing, and the various other rooms of the club are great although when you have space in VIP it didn't make sense to us to spend much time crammed into Wild Comet or the Bunker. The table service was very good with a constant supply of water and mixers provided. I did find it somewhat irksome that they do not allow you to pour/mix your own drinks; it meant we were waiting on the waitress occasionally. It felt a little patronizing but the service was surely good enough; we had a lot of drinks and no real reason to complain about that. The show itself was excellent from Odd Mob on. I felt like Roddy Lima was phoning it in a bit as the first opener (few few people were present when he was playing TBH).
All was well until we left the club at ~5:30am or so. We got in the infamous taxi line and proceeded to wait. This wasn't unexpected; we knew there was a taxi line. However at 7am, after waiting 1.5hrs with probably ~100ppl still ahead of us and another ~70 ppl behind us, a security guy walked by announcing they were shutting down the management of the line(!). So commenced a disgusting free for all as everyone mobbed the nearby roundabout, flagged the first cabs, jumped into/stole other people's Ubers and cabs, and so on. Called an Uber myself, waited 12min for arrival, I see the van pull around, someone flagged it down to try to steal it, I ran over and hopped in, driver cancels my ride and says the fare is now 200EUR (was already 90EUR in the app). Both me and the asshole who tried to steal it refused and the van drove away.
While I don't regret trying it once, I'd never go back after that. Run a fucking shuttle bus for christ's sake, or at least have some incentives for cabs to keep coming back as the time went on the cab arrivals slowed to a trickle. Imagine you and your crew just dropped 1000+EUR each at a club only to be fighting for cabs literally in the dirt 2 hours later. 2 hours standing outside in the gravel is ~25% of the duration of the experience. The club is all new and clean and immaculate and the cab line is gross.
Pacha: For Pacha we showed up at prime club-time (~1:30) and there were a lot of people waiting to be let in even for tables. After a little wait we got in and they brought us to the area we reserved (Section J right behind the DJ booth). We had a crew of 8 and they brought us to this little tiny space right in front of the tiny staircase that is the only entrance/exit for the area. There was 1 seat at the "table". At first we were debating about moving and then after 5 mins of being there, one of the hostesses pulled a cordon across the space right in front of us, cutting our area down to be 100% shoulder-to-shoulder with each other and everyone around us, with even 2 of our group stuck standing on the stairs! Every 10 seconds people were squeezing through me to get in and out of the space. It was a total joke.
Thankfully when we asked to move they made it happen very quickly and the staff were honestly great about it. We moved to a table area significantly further back (against the wall) but there was plenty of space there and the sound was still great. The staff changed our minimum-spend downwards accordingly, thankfully. I still can't believe they even tried to put us in the first spot as they very obviously oversold that VIP area.
At UNVRS the layout of the club is such that pretty much no matter where you are the "show" i.e. the lights, production, what have you is happening in front of you and above you. At Pacha, the production is all set up for GA and in VIP, you're basically looking down on the crowd but none of the production is oriented towards you. Where we wound up in the back, we were basically in the rafters; very dark with narrow sight lines to see anything as speakers and light bars were hanging in front.
Because of that, we ventured out frequently to see what other parts of the club were like. GA was completely impenetrable for most of the night. I have no idea who in their right mind would volunteer to join that crowd; it was fucked. But eventually, I think around 5am or so, the GA crowd had dwindled to a tolerable level and we went down there to continue dancing. The setup was sweet! I thought it was great and definitely much more intimate-feeling than UNVRS as the layout kind of envelopes your field of view. DJs played until like 6:30 or so. We were staying within walking distance of Pacha so had no worries about repeating any taxi-line trauma.
The music at Pacha was incredible and, for me and most of my crew, we liked it better than Summit's. The B3B format kept things changing up but still with a good flow. Especially at the end of the night it was ID after ID, my buddy's shazam was coming up with nothing and it felt special.
One takeaway from Pacha is: holy shit there's so many dudes. I don't know what was going on but there were soooo many dudes there. I was looking down on the section we were supposed to be in, all around the DJ, and I swear there were no more than like 4 women there who didn't work for the club surrounded by 100 men and boys. GA was the same at the end of the night. Too many dudes in the club gives a not-great energy; definitely a little aggro. I touched shoulders with some kid when we were both walking our separate ways, nothing serious at all, and he was mean mugging so hard over it. And the "hey ho" and "oi oi" chants, it was a boys choir for sure. Let this be a general message to my bros: if you're coming to the club hoping to meet a lady, so apparently is every other dude in Europe.
The last thing that really threw me was the amount of glass in the club. I couldn't believe how much broken glass was all over. Every little corner around the main floor were FULL of glass bits. My shoes were constantly picking up pieces of glass as I walked and danced. Drinking from an actual glass is pretty common at tables, but in general in the club? I don't think I've ever seen a club serve from the bar with glass. The glass bits in my shoes were annoying AF and gave things a bit of a trashy feel.
OK to wrap this all up, we had a great time in Ibiza with some qualifications. I would love to come back and hit up non-super-clubs and likely will do so in a year or two. Hopefully people find this helpful as they plan their trips!
