Hasta La Creative!

Typically, thousands of attendees arrive at the festival via taxi after landing at the nearby airport in Nice, but as word spread of cancelled flights and (somewhat exaggerated) “Max Mad”-esque scenes of mayhem at Aroport Nice Cte d’Azur, sunbaked adlanders scrambled to make alternate travel arrangements. One buzzy exit strategy: using UberCopter, an option opportunistically added to the Uber app; initially priced at 160 Euros ($179) for a Cannes-to-Nice trip, high demand briefly drove surge pricing of over 800 Euros — and then, most of the time, a persistent “No Helicopter Available Now” message. (Uber drivers, judging from the lack of the available black cars and vans on the app, quietly abandoned French roads for fear of being targeted.)

At one high-profile event — the invite-only Droga5 Thursday-night dinner party at Michelin-starred restaurant La Village Archange in Le Cannet, two miles north of the Cannes beach, the strike prompted some incongruous scenes.

To get to the party, many guests piled into a series of private vans, organized by Droga, that departed around 6 p.m. from the InterContinental Carlton Cannes. But guests looking to leave the fancy dinner, once it finally wrapped up near midnight, found that the vans had been replaced by a single full-size coach bus, which was parked a long walk from the restaurant. And so a couple dozen adland grandees in evening finery and high heels drunkenly followed a squat French bus driver down a hill to board the bus.

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