There are enough spooks and scares involved in creating a Halloween-themed Haunted House Event; don’t let your ticketing platform add to the gloom! Having a platform that integrates flawlessly with Square technology is a solution to your night-before-the-event nightmares. With so many Eventbrite alternatives on the market, it’s hard to know which one will integrate best with your haunted house. With all the steps involved in executing a perfect Halloween event, it’s a relief to at least not have to fret over your ticketing solution. Planning your Haunted House Event with a Square integrated ticketing system will save and protect you from things that go bump in the night and other event pitfalls.

Planning a Haunted House Attraction

With over 4,000 paid Haunted House events in the nation, it is easy to see that these are crowd-drawing attractions. Before you dive headfirst into your future haunted house experience, here are a few top-level things to consider.

Find a great location. Depending on your location (urban, suburban, or rural), there may be a local space that lends itself as the focal point of your haunted attraction. Corn mazes evoke the mood of the season, and everyone loves the spooky feeling of being lost in the silky confines of the maze. But this feature likely won’t work in an urban environment. Consider the option of warehouse space; maybe a haunted and (fake) bloody derelict meat-packing slaughterhouse plant could be crafted? Or is there a seldom-used institutional space like an old school or health-care facility that could be transformed into a creepy-vibe location? Let your imagination take you to some scary places as you look through Craigslist or other mid-term rental options.

Logistics are key. Once you find your perfect creepy location, what are the logistics involved? Is the location safe? Is there ample parking for your guests? How will you guide patrons from the lot to the entry gates of your Haunted House? Once inside the facility, fire control, emergency exits and the like need to be plotted out, and a safe exit plan needs to be created for attendees in a typically low-light, disorienting environment. Pre-sales of thousands of tickets are great, but you need to make sure that your attendees have a fun, and above all, safe time in your attraction.

Related: Those long lines! No one who has purchased their tickets in advance wants to wait in a long line. Before they even have a chance to experience the creepy environment you have created, guests waiting in line are already frustrated. Removing any possible friction points between event execution and your attendees should be a primary goal of the event planner.  With the SimpleTix platform as your ticketing platform, minimizing lines at the gate is an easy solution to this problem.

Get your marketing locked down. In the past, television and radio marketing were top options for haunted house attractions, and the cooling weeks leading up to Halloween were inundated with ads on these media giants. Today, with so many lower-cost internet options available for advertising, event planners can feel tapped out with choices. Do Google and Facebook ads feature prominently in your advertising campaigns? You may want to consider them, as well as promoted posts on Twitter and Instagram. Are there event aggregators in your area that will promote your events for a fee? Many times, these aggregators have a massive social media or email reach, far more than your organic audience. Don’t forget the lowly print publications that are desperate for copy on community events; some of these papers will also feature your attraction on their Events page, and these links can be shared by interested attendees. And don’t overlook the value of a billboard or an illustrative banner promoting your event; these are particularly impactful on major thoroughfares close to the location of your physical haunted house.

Don’t skimp on the costumes. Sure, the spaces your guests will be in are inherently dark. But the devil is in the details, so to speak, and your talent’s costumes need to be top-notch. That doesn’t necessarily mean expensive; value can be achieved by purchasing second-hand (outdated suits for your zombie hoard), but the detail of the character’s make-up, the pattern of blood spatters, and the names on the mock tombstones are all examples of where a little extra time spent will do wonders for your crowd’s appreciation of your efforts. The little things like that will help your production look more professional, and that will guarantee you repeat customers for next Halloween’s haunted house. Word of mouth is some of the best, free marketing you can get.

Early Bird Tickets and Instant Payouts

Haunted Houses tend to see a large volume of early bird tickets. SimpleTix, unlike other Eventbrite alternatives, will pay those purchases out instantly. With this instant remuneration feature, event organizers have cash in hand to pivot to other expenses associated with the Haunted House. This financial flexibility is a great value add for the event planner and reduces the hassle of dealing with banks or other lending institutions.

Maybe you would like to leverage this financial flexibility for more marketing and advertising campaigns? Paying upfront for those aforementioned web-based services will give you a better idea of where you stand in your P&L books before the start date of the event rolls around.

Or perhaps you could start making your merch purchases? Concessions, t-shirts, hats, other apparel, art, and take-home trinkets can all be sold and purchased through your ticketing application. This saves you time and hassle by not having to administer multiple, redundant systems during your haunted house event, and your event staff will not have to be trained on different systems. The final result is a happier customer presented with more opportunities to spend money on your platform.

All of these optimizations are easily rolled into one ticketing solution. The Haunted Field of Screams is a Colorado-based Haunted House that leveraged the SimpleTix platform as an Eventbrite alternative for festival ticketing. With a scary carnival, a haunted corn maze, and a paintball battle with rotting zombies, this festival had several different activities wrapped up in their ticketing platform. With over 20,000 attendees, they found SimpleTix to be flexible to their needs and robust enough to handle that high volume of sales. Like any other SimpleTix event, the organizers were able to use the platform to track sales and contact the ticket purchasers with event details. The platform’s integration with Square technology allowed for on-site, day-of-event ticket sales.

SimpleTix is a flexible platform that can handle all of your event needs – not just your scary haunted house! When November finally arrives, SimpleTix will be there to finish out the calendar and be your dependable ticketing platform for the year to come. So while “something wicked this way comes,” you are choosing a fantastic and flexible events solution for the happier events in your future!

• SimpleTix has offered an affordable, premium event ticketing platform that outperforms Eventbrite and similar apps for over 12 years. Compared to the competition, SimpleTix offers better options at a better price point. To learn more, call us at +1 (855) 550-3670 or email us here.