The aphorism that money cannot buy you happiness has rarely been felt more keenly than at the luxury tent village at Glastonbury Festival. Revellers who paid £1,650 to hire a traditional Native American tepee were furious that organisers had no way of stopping rain cascading through the hole in the middle of their tents.

Unlike traditional tepees, which have a fire in the middle to keep the damp out, Glaston-bury’s tepee village is banned from lighting fires for safety reasons. The problem is usually overcome by placing a “rain cap” over the hole, but families who thought they had paid for a premium service were told that there were only a handful to go around the 300 tents.

Kevin Stockton, 49, a water maintenance consultant, also found that most tents were not fitted with waterproof groundsheets, so he was soaked not only from above but from the soggy ground beneath. “We’ve been flooded out every time it has rained,” he told The Times. “About 5 or 10 per cent of tepees have rain caps. When we asked reception why they couldn’t give us one, they said that they didn’t predict the weather was going to be so bad.”

One entry left in the comments book for the site reports that residents were struggling to stay afloat: “[We] now require waders to get to bed. We have paid an awful lot of money and the water is coming up through the floor as [the tent] had been sited on a bog – please help!”

Alison Dean, 37, a nurse from Newquay, Cornwall, whose tepee was flooded, said: “When I complained I was handed a shovel and told to dig a trench,” she said. The camp organiser later dug a trench, but dug it uphill from the tepee so that when it filled up the water overflowed into their tent.

Tara Weightman, whose company, Hearthworks, manages the tepee site, said that revellers should have been aware that tepees had holes in the middle. “It’s pretty much impossible to have a tepee that is drip-free, even if you have a rain cap.” He said that waterproof groundsheets would not have helped because water was running across the field. “It’s a nightmare. It is part of the Glas-tonbury experience that people get damp and muddy.”

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010