BOURNEMOUTH 7S
Just the ticket How Tixel helped Bournemouth 7s, the sports and music festival, keep attendance up and refunds down
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fter launching as a rugby festival in 2008 to a crowd of 8,000, Bournemouth 7s has quickly grown into one of the world’s largest sport and music festivals. Showcasing everything from netball and hockey to dodgeball and CrossFit, along with a music festival across 12 themed arenas, the event is now attended by 30,000 fans, including 4,000 campers and glampers, 2,000 VIPS and 400 sports teams. In 2021, the Bournemouth 7s team partnered with Tixel, an online platform designed for safe ticket resale. It would be the festival’s first outing with COVID-19 restrictions in play.
NO-SHOWS AND REFUND REQUESTS
With the UK’s “Freedom Day” (July 19) taking place only one month prior to the event, the Bournemouth 7s team took on an astonishing feat – putting together a 30,000 capacity sports and music festival in just 42 days. With their work cut out for them, the last thing the team needed was a heavy workload for refund requests and resale enquiries. Bournemouth 7s engaged Tixel and relaunched the sell-out
festival. With the UK coming out of lengthy lockdowns and restrictions on events, Bournemouth 7s 2021 required all attendees to show proof of their COVID-19 status — vaccination, a negative lateral flow test, or natural immunity. Such proof is now a requirement to run a safe festival, but these measures can also increase the rate of no-shows and refund requests if a ticketholder can no longer attend the event/festival. Thankfully for Bournemouth 7s, this wasn’t the case. Callie Worth, commercial manager, explained: “If individuals unfortunately caught COVID-19 or simply couldn’t attend the new dates, they were directed towards Tixel. This was a great way for fans to essentially get their money back — while replacing the attendee with a new customer who could attend our event.”
EASING THE WORKLOAD
The Tixel partnership allowed Bournemouth 7s to do several things: • Successfully operate a norefunds policy by offering a safe place for fans to trade tickets if they were unwell, had a change
of plans, or didn’t meet the COVID-19 safety requirements in time for the event. • Reduce the workload of event staff by redirecting all refund and resale ticketing enquiries to Tixel; and • Harness fresh audience data from a waitlist to run targeted ticket sales campaigns for the 2022 event.
Worth continued: “Our fans successfully traded more than 1,000 tickets, which is incredible and something we were very impressed with. By reselling these tickets, it saved us a number of no-shows and kept our festival atmosphere alive. The site felt busy, particularly on the Saturday, which was really helped by the resale tickets.
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