Blog and announcements
Guides and strategies for event organizers on ticketing, event marketing, fan engagement, and growth.
TicketingTicketing Platform Fees Explained: Pricing Models, Hidden Costs and a Total-Cost Framework
An event ticketing platform charges in one of five ways: a flat per-ticket fee, a percentage of face value, a share of buyer-side service fees, a SaaS licence, or a hybrid of these. Either the ticket buyer pays the fee on top of face value or the organizer absorbs it into the price. Two vendors quoting similar headline rates can differ by six figures across a season, which is why the headline rate is the least useful number in the contract.
Read more
TicketingEvent Staffing: How Many People Does Your Event Actually Need?
A defensible baseline: one steward for every 250 expected attendees, and entry lanes sized so no lane has to process more than 660 people per hour, both figures published by the UK's Sports Grounds Safety Authority, the body behind the Green Guide. Security, scanning, hospitality and accessibility roles layer on top through a risk assessment. This article turns those anchors into a staffing model you can run for any event, with a worked 20,000-attendee example.
Read more
TicketingThe Museum and Cultural Venue Playbook: Ticketing, Membership and Programming Revenue
Museums and cultural venues grow ticketing and membership revenue by treating entry as sellable inventory instead of an open door: timed tickets that control flow and enable pricing tiers, a membership program designed around visit frequency, programming that sells the building after hours, and retail attached to the ticket path. The institutions growing earned revenue fastest have stopped treating admission as the product. The product is a programmable venue, and the shift starts at the entrance.
Read more
TicketingPayment Failures, Declines and Chargebacks: The Ticketing Revenue Leak Nobody Budgets For
Payments fail during high-demand ticket sales because thousands of near-identical card transactions hit issuer risk models within minutes, a pattern those models read as card testing, not fandom, so legitimate buyers get declined at the exact moment demand peaks. Organizers reduce chargebacks the same way they reduce declines: by treating authorization rates, local payment methods, retry logic and dispute evidence as ticketing infrastructure, not as the bank's problem. Here is where the money leaks, and the four-layer stack that closes it.
Read more
TicketingFrom Day Tickets to Memberships: A Recurring-Revenue Playbook for Attraction Operators
Attractions build recurring revenue by moving visitors up a ladder: single ticket, bundle, multi-visit pass, membership, community. The mechanics are specific. Price the pass at 2 to 3 times a day ticket, protect the on-site experience with timed entry, and sell the next rung while the visit is still warm, using visitor data you own. An operator that sells only day tickets rebuys its audience every morning.
Read more
TicketingThe Destination Events Flywheel: How Tourism Boards Turn an Event Calendar into a Visitor Economy
Tourism boards grow visitor numbers with events by doing four things in sequence: staging anchor events that give travelers a dated reason to book, coordinating those events into a year-round calendar, distributing that calendar through the channels where travelers already book, and owning the data that shows who came, what they spent and when they return. Run together, these moves compound into a visitor economy. Run separately, they remain marketing costs.
Read more