Parlez-vous ticket?

On February 12th it was finally time for the stadium concert of French superstar ZAZ, in the AFAS Live.

None of our tickets were resold for profit, although the tickets sold by TicketMaster were of course not protected. Unsurprisingly, these were offered on secondary platforms for >%200 of the original price…

The amount of visitors — AFAS Live seats 6,000 visitors — posed an interesting challenge (opportunity!) for our system. Seeing as both GUTS and Ticketmaster sold tickets for the show, it was important for us to make the entrance of visitors using GUTS’ tickets as smooth as possible and avoid any unnecessary waste of time.

This was the perfect chance for us to utilise the direct communication features. The feature, allowing artists and event organizers to send messages straight to the mobile phones of tickets holders, has been received very well so far; comedian Jochem Myjer sends practically all his audiences a positive message on the day of a show they are attending, and sometimes sends another one after an especially memorable performance.

Smart ticketing: No fraud, no scalping, direct communication and countless of other benefits!

In last month’s blog, we also noted how the feature helped us reach ticket holders who had tickets for an event for which the artist had gotten sick on the day of the performance:

“While of course an unfortunate situation, this feature prevented a huge amount of additional disappointment and frustration from visitors traveling from far and wide and actually showing up to a closed door. The shows were rescheduled, for which the existing tickets were automatically transferred. People who couldn’t attend on the new date could easily put their ticket up for sale, although over 90% of the people kept their tickets. This process meant a lot less hassle for both visitor and event organizers — no tickets needed to be refunded and less costs had to be made.”

The ZAZ show posed a new way to use the feature, namely for specific on-location information meant to guide the flow of the attendants. Visitors who bought tickets through GUTS were guided to the GUTS entrance, saving them a lot of time. (There was hardly a line here, throughout the evening.)

Check out our recap video of the event here:

For event organizers, especially those of large scale events, the type of ‘crowd control’ that is possible with direct communication is incredibly valuable. Being able to direct massive amounts of people at your events can be of great importance, for various possible reasons. It could be to point attendants to a performance that is about to start, or notify those at the event of a specific discount on merchandise, for example.

These reasons are of course trumped by the most important possible utility of the feature: safety. Being able to directly communicate to all of the attendants of your event can save lives in an emergency situation: All those present can immediately be notified on what’s going on and where they need to go. This prevents unnecessary panic and allows the event organizer to remain in control of the situation.

The event went well for us, and it not only proved the benefit of our anti-scalping measures — although next time we would much rather sell all of the tickets, since allowing any tickets to be sold through traditional platforms like TicketMaster opens the door for scalpers to do as they please, as was the case for this show — but it also gave us the chance to highlight other features, which will entice other potential clients who organize larger scale events.

We are already talking to promoters about setting up new events.