Ticket Fairy provided services for Grillstock Festival 2016
and this is currently being integrated into Eventbrite products. “Eventbrite is evolving into an event technology platform that simplifies events before, while and after they take place,” comments Joel Crouch, general manager for the UK and Ireland. “We have noticed strong demand from large festivals and venues like Womad, Ministry of Sound or Boomtown, who value our technological and e-commerce capabilities to help them efficiently grow their events.”
SKIDDLE Having been a primary ticket agent for a decade now, Skiddle has delivered a number of changes within 2016 that see its status as an innovator cemented within the industry. The two pivotal ones are both new features. Firstly, Re:Sell enables customers to sell their tickets back to other music fans, negating the need for touts and providing a fair way for people to get access to sold-out shows, and those who can no longer attend events to move on tickets readily. Skiddle says that the Re:Sell system was trialled with great success at Belladrum Festival in the Scottish highlands – an event that consistently sells out its five-figure capacity. The second change is Cool:Off and goes even further. Taking inspiration from the retail sector where generous return policies have been shown to statistically increase sales, event promoters are entitled to offer their customers a 72-hour grace period to return the tickets after purchase. It encourages impulse buys and means customers don’t wait to guarantee their plans, running the risk of missing out. “This year, we’ve undertaken a long process of looking at where we stand
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in the industry, as well as a detailed analysis of how ticketing works. We’ve discovered quite a few ways how both can be better, and Re:Sell and Cool:Off is just the start of us shifting the paradigms in ticketing,” comments Skiddle founder, Ben Sebborn.
SEATS.IO Seats.io is a reserved seating plug-in for online ticketing. Its intuitive online seating chart designer gives nontechnical people the ability to draw floor plans of any size and type, and to seamlessly integrate them within any online registration form. After the onsale, ticket buyers can simply select the seats they want – from any device – or let the system choose the best available seats at that time. Research shows that reserved seating makes people buy more tickets sooner. Ben Verbeken, CEO at Seats.io, explains: “Selling seats creates a sense of urgency for attendees: they can see where the best seats for your event are, and they can also see that other people are buying seats. This effect is amplified when a lot of tickets are sold soon after the onsale: because those seats are going out fast, it will make customers want to decide to buy now.” So event organisers have everything to win by offering reserved seating on their online registration tool. Verbeken notes, “It’s what our numbers show. Over 350k seats get booked through Seats.io on a monthly basis now, and one of our users, a ticketing technology provider with a 100% growth rate, even told us that all of their growth is from reserved seating. “We listen very carefully to what our users tell us, it’s how we evolve our product. As an example: we noticed that some of our users were struggling
with selling season tickets next to regular tickets. Allowing a ticket buyer to select a seat for a series of events – instead of just for a single event – proved to be a real technical challenge. And so we dramatically simplified that by adding out-of-the-box support for season tickets.” For the near future, Seats.io plans to release a number of much-asked-for features such as view-from-your-seat and a superfast way of labeling large quantities of seats.
NEVER EMPTY Live events have a bilateral inefficiency: unsold tickets in low demand events, and a huge upside in high demand events, which the venues and event promoters never see. When pricing strategies do not match the actual demand and market value of the ticket, the results are weak revenues at low demand events, and revenue lost to black market agents and resellers at high demand events. An innovative solution is the one offered by Never Empty and currently used by leading Spanish football clubs. This ticketing startup provides venues and event promoters a white-label platform, which allows them to open up sales phases on their websites (and other sales channels), during which fans input the amount they are willing to pay for the tickets. This platform is fully integrated into venues’ existing ticketing infrastructure, allowing promoters to play around with the threshold for accepted bids, according to real-time availability of tickets. While traditional dynamic pricing algorithms can increase flight and hotel utilisation rates tremendously, Never Empty’s system goes a step further, always ensuring an exact match between the real market value of the ticket, and the price received for it by the venue or promoter. “With Never Empty, we’ve created the most economically efficient method of selling and buying tickets, ensuring maximum satisfaction for both the event-goers and promoters/venues,” says Never Empty founder and CEO, Matan Ganani. “Poorly devised pricing strategies are enabling black market agents to retain millions in potential revenue which should belong to the event promoters and venues.”