Lanxess Arena Celebrates Carnival Season Visitor Record

The German carnival season is called Fasching. And nowhere do Germans celebrate the season more enthusiastically than in Cologne, where Lanxess Arena hosts an event series each year called “Lachende Kölnarena” (“Cologne’s laughing arena”).

This year, between Jan. 24 and March 2, the arena welcomed some 250,000 carnival revelers across 18 events, which marks a new record.

The number of visitors averages out at 13,888 per event, but capacities vary from event to event. On Feb. 8, for instance, 17,601 people bought a ticket, grossing $903,107, according to the boxoffice report submitted to Pollstar.

One of two days dedicated to children, Feb. 1, saw the capacity reduced to 12,000. On that day, 11,644 tickets generated $229,023, according to the Pollstar Boxoffice.

Across all 18 dates, Lanxess Arena welcomed more than 100,000 guests more to its carnival events than in 2024.

“Lachende Kölnarena” was launched by Otto Hofner in 1965. It’s been taking place at LANXESS arena since 1998, when the building first opened as Kölnarena. Now, in 2025, the traditional format is celebrating its 60th anniversary, and, as the numbers indicate, this special milestone was well-received.

Welcoming that amount of people wouldn’t have been possible, if the operators of Lanxess Arena, on almost all dates, hadn’t opened up the top tier of seats for the first time in the event’s 26-year history at the building.

Lanxess Arena ranked 15th in terms of ticket sales on Pollstar’s Q4/2024 arena chart, with just north of one million tickets reported to the Pollstar Boxoffice in the period, or 1,039,992 to be exact. They generated gross revenues of $71,258,360, which placed the building on rank 35 in Q4.

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