Blog
How the Right Ticketing Solution Can Create a Better Gameday Experience
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The right ticketing solution can make the difference between your fans' gameday experiences being memorable or worth forgetting. In this article, we’ll show you how our Eventbrite alternative can make your gameday operations easier and more efficient while increasing your fans’ satisfaction with their minor league game day experience. Learn how you can use SimpleTix to: Offer season passes Pre-sell individual game tickets Upsell concessions and merch Effectively deploying your event ticketing software can lead to increased attendance at minor-league games. Moreover, cohesive communication between ticket sales and service staff can also keep customer satisfaction at an all-league high. By deploying the right Eventbrite alternative, your ballpark leverage growth and customer loyalty, too. Season Passes With the right Eventbrite alternative ticketing software, you can offer your fans a myriad of ticketing options that fit their schedule and lifestyle best. Full-season tickets are the obvious option, and a fruitful segment to market to. Full-season ticket holders tend to spend more money at the arena buying food, snacks and drinks, team merch, and other upsells. But not all fans are looking to attend every single home game, some want options to attend multiple games throughout the season without the hassle of buying multiple individual tickets. Try offering your fans varied ticket packages that allow you to provide different bundles of tickets and other up-sells to your guests. Establishing a consistent revenue stream can also be achieved with half-season and event quarter-season ticketing packages. Presenting these options to your ticket purchasers is an easy option with SimpleTix’s event ticketing segmentation, which allows your game attendees to still be engaged with the team on that “super fan” level. A robust event ticketing platform moves past these rigid structures and offers various options: Multi-game ticket packages that assign fans the same seat for all 10 games....
Built to Help Farms Succeed
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This year, we sought to make it even simpler for our 300+ farm clients to drive revenue from their events and make the most of their busiest season. Our partnership with Maize allowed us to offer better prices for farms and release a ton of new features that helped our farm clients sell over a million tickets in October. Vala’s Pumpkin Patch and Apple Orchard in Gretna, Nebraska used SimpleTix to sell tens of thousands of tickets this year. Here’s how they took full advantage of the SimpleTix platform. Multiple ticket typesVala’s sold general admission tickets, season passes, and reservations for campfires and party barns. Vala’s created even more ticket options according to the size of campfire or party barn. With SimpleTix’s peak/off-peak feature, Vala’s could disallow off-peak tickets on its most valuable days of operation.See how you can customize SimpleTix to your farm >> Pre-sold concessions and cateringVala’s tied its concessions sales into the ticketing process. Customers could pre-order everything from cider to pie to party platters when they bought their ticket, then use their digital ticket to redeem their concessions once they arrived on the farm. This helped Vala’s anticipate how much to prepare and keep the lines moving because staff didn’t have to handle as much cash.See how SimpleTix makes it simpler to run your farm >> Specialized upsellsVala’s created a specific set of higher-value upsells for parties who reserved the highest tier of bonfire or party barn. When a customer added a high-tier ticket to their cart, they were served this premium upsell list within the SimpleTix purchase process. Once they checked in at Vala’s, the staff could see their pre-ordered upsells and deliver them promptly.See how SimpleTix upsells can boost your bottom line >> Keeping the lines movingWhen tickets are bought in a group, SimpleTix...
Staying COVID-Ready: Four Tips for Your Holiday Event
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With 85% of Americans stating they were planning on celebrating the holidays, even during the 2021 Winter COVID wave, it is easy to see how the spread of the pandemic would impact holiday event operations. In 2021, holiday retail sales alone were nearly 850 billion dollars, so celebrating the season is big business for your event operation. As a holiday event venue, your number one priority is to keep your attendees safe when they are at your ice rink, holiday play, or other amusement. While concerns like fire exits, clear paths of egress, and maximum room capacities have always been paramount in your safety plan, stopping the spread of COVID-19 at your holiday event needs to be prioritized as well. If there is one thing COVID-19 has shown, it is that large indoor gatherings of people are the first to be impacted by the waves of variants of the coronavirus. Venues and event managers are well-rehearsed in this reality. Spikes in positive cases tend to coincide with holiday event programming. Are you prepared if COVID cases spike again and you have to change how you run your ice-skating rink or other holiday attraction? By following these four simple tips, you can leverage your event ticketing software to help you meet these challenges head-on. Tip 1: Stay Informed to Be Prepared Sources like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will have solid, science-based guidelines for large gatherings and live events. Your state or county’s health departments may have specific regulations or recommendations for your venue to establish based on local variants or conditions. As we have learned over the past two and a half years, the landscape of the pandemic can change at a moment’s notice. Keeping abreast of conditions and developments within your community will enable you to be flexible and adaptable...
Three Major Problems That Keep Your Ice Skating Rink From Running Efficiently
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Ah, ice skating, the perfect winter pastime. Put on a warm, fuzzy hat, a fleece coat, mittens, and a scarf, and get some hot cocoa on a frosty January day! Perfect weather to head out onto the ice with family—perhaps for a romantic date or to learn to skate for the first time. It sounds like a wonderful time, but this lovely outing could be thwarted by a few problems. Crowded ice rinks, equipment shortages, and limited staff can ruin your guests’ winter fun. There’s a big difference between the silly fun of falling on the ice in the company of your friends and family and falling and creating a huge skater pileup on a jam-packed rink stuffed with frustrated people whose good times have been marred by simply trying to get a date for this outing! This year, avoid these issues! Partner with SimpleTix, the event ticket system that will save you time and money and ensure your guests will be able to make the most of their time on the ice at your rink! With SimpleTix, event ticketing is simple, straightforward, and hassle-free! Read on to see how SimpleTix can help solve your ice skating rink woes! 1. The Ice Is Too Crowded In 2015, approximately 50,000 people sustained injuries from ice skating. With that many people getting injured per year, it’s important to keep safety in mind when planning a trip. While serious injuries can occur, the most common types of injuries are bruises or contusions on areas of the body that take the hardest landing during a fall. As a rink owner, you want to prevent as many of these incidents from occurring as possible. Many families come from a distance to your ice rink, only to find that when they get there, the ice is...
4 use cases for timed entry ticketing that have nothing to do...
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The event ticketing industry has undergone fundamental changes since March 2020. The way people interacted with each other during the pandemic brought to light new ways of thinking about how we gather together, and as a society, we have shifted some of these interactions. Some of these changes—remote work is an obvious example—‚are here to stay. Many of these modifications were for health and safety concerns, but two and a half years later, a few of these adaptations have morphed how we gather for our leisure or lifestyle pursuits. Timed entry event ticketing is one of these examples. As we move into the “new normal” of running events after COVID, expect some of these changes to our industry to stick around. Your attendees became used to timed entry as the “business as usual” way of attending gatherings during COVID, and many of them now still enjoy the benefits that these ticket types bring to their lifestyle. Timed entry ticketing makes your event workflow easier and your attendees happier. Some cultural institutions and other event venues are ending their timed entry ticketing options, but other operations are leaning into this option to make improvements in their workflow and customer experience. Timed entry ticketing seems like an obvious solution for drive-in theaters, museum exhibitions, and farm and agritourism events. Event managers that operate seasonal events like haunted houses or holiday light exhibitions will benefit from this ticketing category as well. Think about this solution the next time you see the line stretching down the block from your ticket gate right before your event starts. Timed entry removes friction points from almost every type of event. Timed entry is not as restricting as you might think. While you have ultimate control over the flexibility of your event ticketing software, your customers don’t have...
4 Event Ticketing Hacks to Make Your Drive-In Theater More Efficient and...
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Are you taking advantage of your event ticketing platform to guarantee that you are maximizing the revenue you can achieve from all those excited customers, eagerly anticipating the late-night, double-feature picture show? There are so many touch points and opportunities to upsell and improve your guests' experience with the right event ticketing application… does yours bring all the opportunities available to your operation? By deploying the best event ticketing software, you will ensure that your drive-in theater isn’t leaving any money on the table. Missed opportunities from the wrong ticketing systems are not unique to drive-in theaters. Christmas light exhibitions, haunted houses, and other drive-thru operations will see increased profits from the following hacks as well. Check out how these 4 hacks can make your drive-in theater more efficient and profitable. Hack #1: Going Digital Traditionally, drive-in theaters have been cash-only for tickets and concessions. Families would line their cars up fifteen minutes before dusk, file in, park, wait through a lengthy concessions line, and then hope to get back to their car before the feature film started. Thankfully, this is no longer the case. The best event ticketing software can transform the movie-going experience for both you and your patrons. A state-of-the-art digital ticketing system can enable 24/7 online ticket sales and open up a new line of ticket buyers, while also eliminating the cash shuffle at the gate and the concession stand, which increases your guests' wait times. Not only will you have more real-time visibility into your drive-in’s finances, but the convenience of online ticketing options will likely drive an increase in ticket sales as well. The best event ticketing software offers your operation much more flexibility than traditional cash tickets purchased at the time of the film, and the system is intuitive and easy to use. ...
How to Eliminate Drive-Thru Holiday Light Display Frustration and Friction with SimpleTix
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During the Winter holiday season and especially during the month of December, some of the most beloved and popular attractions are the local drive-thru Christmas light displays. As magical and lovely as these lights can be, holiday light drive-thrus can have issues that can make your guests' experience less than ideal. Leverage your event ticketing platform to help you eliminate: Frustrations around sold-out events Traffic on the main roads Long lines at the entry Wait-times for concessions Instead of your attendees waiting in seemingly unending lines this year, why not make their experience a bit easier and merrier and help them plan this year’s holiday lights visit with SimpleTix, the Eventbrite alternative that will help save you and your attendees time and money so that they can focus on enjoying this holiday tradition with their loved ones. Holiday light attractions are just one of many types of events SimpleTix serves to make your attendees' experiences smoother and more delightful! Timed Entry and Pre-Sale Tickets Some advantages to using SimpleTix when attending drive-thru holiday lights this year include timed entry and presale ticketing features. Presale ticketing and timed entry help attendees avoid those long lines, which allows you to be more effective with crowd control. Timed entry ticketing lets you place attendees in specific time slots, so they don’t arrive all at once. This way, the main neighborhood roads in addition to surrounding residential side streets won’t be bottlenecked in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 7 PM–you can stagger the guests to come throughout the evening. Timed entry is also key when it comes to overall safety because it limits the number of people and cars in a neighborhood or at a venue at any given time. With pre-sale only tickets, you can also limit the number of cars per day, again decreasing...
Tips to Avoid Pissing Off Police with this Event Ticketing System for...
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With the growth drive-in theaters have seen since the pandemic and the lines of cars waiting for entrance, it is no wonder that they came under the watchful eye of local police departments. The local police department might not care for your drive-in theater because of the safety concerns and the impact it can have on traffic when people are trying to enter your operation. And while drive-in theaters are facing plenty of challenges this year, adding pissed-off police officers to the mix won’t help. But by using the right event ticketing software or event registration tool, you can remedy some of the issues that the police might have with your drive-in theater, and you will likely increase customer loyalty in the process. Use Your Event Ticketing & Event Registration Tool to Avoid Disgruntled Police The law enforcement reaction to your business model is understandable with their concerns for local safety and preventing traffic back ups. Long lines into events can back up traffic on main roads and frustrate local police. These lines often require police to take time out of their schedules to direct traffic instead of doing other tasks related to public safety. So rather than complain about these inevitable reactions from police, why not take a moment to see what solutions are offered by your event registration tool? Event ticketing software like SimpleTix has several features built into the platform that can minimize some of the friction that officers face when dealing with the inevitabilities of drive-in theater operations. With timed entry, effective pre-sales, and deployment of mindful QR coding, you'll be able to get your guest in the door faster, which will keep local law enforcement happy. Here are some ways to improve your drive-in theater and avoid issues with your local law enforcement. Get...
Solving 4 Event Ticketing Challenges With SimpleTix
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Selecting the right event management software does more than simply sell tickets. Your event ticketing solution should create a better experience for attendees and allow you to smooth out some of the most common event headaches. Parking Shenanigans Whether you run a pumpkin patch, an outdoor music festival, or a drive-in movie theater, parking is always an issue for your attendees. Traffic often slows down to a crawl even before attendees see your operation location, and agitation builds in your guests even before they set foot on your grounds. First impressions can often taint their impression of the event overall. The last thing you want to do is get off on the wrong foot! One of the main friction points of parking is paying the parking fee at the entrance gate. As cars stop to conduct this necessary exchange, many times a massive backup follows, which can leave unhappy customers. But with the right event ticketing platform, your guests can purchase parking passes directly in the app when they are purchasing their tickets. This helps on a few fronts; your parking operations run smoother and faster, leading to increased customer satisfaction, and the guests remove some of their pre-event anxiety at that purchase point. When your event attendees don’t have to worry about parking ahead of time, they can focus on the more fun aspects of event preparation. Let them worry about what they are going to wear, not how long they will have to wait in line to park. Pre-paid parking through SimpleTix is also easier to scan in at the gate when compared to paying for parking at the gate. No more fumbling for cash or dealing with declined credit or debit cards—it’s already taken care of! Guests just show the QR code on their phone, your gate...
3 Ways that Event Management Software Can Dummy-Proof Your Customer’s Experience
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Every event planner knows that you can’t completely dummy-proof your attendees’ event experience, but by leveraging the tools built into your event management software, you can remove many of the speed bumps and friction points. SimpleTix’s event management software eliminates the top three most common event ticketing obstacles: Making lost tickets easier to retrieve Reminders of event dates Easy merch redemption Take the pain out of refunds 1: Making lost tickets easier to retrieve Digital tickets are one of the industry trends that event managers are embracing. Paper tickets get lost, washed in the laundry, or forgotten. Customers don't really have to keep up with a digital ticket, especially with SimpleTix. Tickets can be used in digital form on a phone or even a smartwatch If someone in a group loses or forgets their ticket, the gate staff can scan in the entire group with someone else's ticket If a customer shows up without their ticket, gate staff can check them in manually with a simple name or email search A customer can have SimpleTix text them replacement tickets. 2: Reminders of event dates In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it's easy for a customer to simply forget the day of the event entirely. Even though this isn't the fault of the venue or the organizer — and even though you still get to keep the ticket revenue — it's a missed opportunity for on-site sales and an experience that could inspire word of mouth. SimpleTix gives you everything you need to keep your customers in the know and build excitement about your event. By default, SimpleTix will send a reminder message to attendees one day before the event, but SimpleTix lets organizers customize the dates and frequency of reminders however they need to. From the SimpelTix platform,...
SimpleTix v. TicketSpice: The Features Make the Difference When Picking Alternatives to...
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Bumping along on the hayride tractor, picking the perfect pumpkin, or standing around the campfire roasting marshmallows and sipping steaming cocoa—this is how your attendees want to interact with your farm! Instead, many guests spend their time messing around on a farm’s clunky and unresponsive ticketing webpage; wasting their precious time or experiencing enough frustration that they don’t even purchase a ticket. Choosing the right event ticketing software can make or break the experience of the attendees you host. The first point of contact you have with many of these potential, life-long customers is through your event ticketing app. As they move through the ticketing process, you begin the attendee’s farm event journey and start to nurture customer loyalty and the desire to share their experiences with their social network. When you begin to consider different Eventbrite alternative platforms, it is important to keep in mind the functionality you need to run your farm-based events. SimpleTix leads the alternatives to Eventbrite, and the features are what make this platform stand out. Eventbrite Alternatives that Play Well with Square. Not all ticketing solutions were created equal; the proof is in the features of the system. Some alternatives to Eventbrite have a bit of a rocky reputation among event planners and managers. For example, TicketSpice has made many promises to their customers that they just haven’t been able to deliver on. Unfortunately, these broken promises have led to integration hiccups for event planners seeking a top-performing Eventbrite alternative. Several of these speedbumps have involved compatibility with Square, and as of this writing, these issues haven’t been resolved, creating needless friction points and unnecessary workarounds. But it’s not just the farm event managers that have been slighted in these oversights. Customers have been affected as well. In today’s app-hungry consumer base, your event...
How 3 SimpleTix Super Users Leverage Their Event Ticketing Software for Successful...
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Earlier this month, we showed how SimpleTix super user Valas Pumpkin Patch rolled out their platform and took advantage of all the event ticketing options embedded in the software. Valas used SimpleTix as a cornerstone of their entire operation by managing merchandising, season passes, timed and peak/off-peak entry, and concessions within the SimpleTix platform. Farms and agrotourism attractions aren't the only venues that can use SimpleTix's robust set of features to create efficiencies, increase loyalty, and grow their businesses. Today, we'll talk about how a few other SimpleTix superstars are streamlining their ticketing processes to drive more revenue. Santa Margarita Catholic High School Located in sunny San Luis Obispo County, California, Santa Margarita Catholic High School (SMCHS) takes full advantage of the myriad of solutions offered by its event ticketing software—and for good reason. SMCHS teams have won 64 California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) championships, 92 individual or relay CIF Championships, 201 league championships, and five state championships with 50 SMCHS athletes having earned the title of CIF Player of the Year. Their athletic programming is very popular with the student body, and the school needs a robust system that is easy for the attendees to use. But SMCHS’s event ticketing solution needed to be user-friendly on the back end too. Many of these events are assisted by student and parent volunteers that may not have a lot of training, and they need to be able to understand and utilize the platform. Ease of operation is vital to super users. The SimpleTix platform enables SMCHS to issue tickets to other events outside the sporting realm. Prom, the Homecoming Dance, and other dance events are ticketed through the platform, as well as registration for Mother’s Club, Dad’s Club, and other social functions. SAT prep classes can be registered and paid for through...