I go to my fair share of events throughout the year and each event is a bit different. One thing that is always the same, is that the ticketing system is not like a baseball game or other major event. At these larger events you present your ticket, it’s scanned and you enter the venue.
However at most business events I attend, there’s a long confusing queue, you go to the line designated by your last name, wait for them to find your badge and then you proceed. It’s this simple – if you’re lucky.
Ticketmaster services the needs of very large production companies, but is there a way to have “big company features” at small company prices?
TicketLeap.com offers a solution that lets you fulfill your ticket orders online, just like EventBrite (which I use for the annual Small Business Summit) and Cvent (which provides free lunches as you listen to a pitch of their feature rich services).
TicketLeap.com also offers a solution for on site ticketing, to give you the “large event” features you need, all within your budget.
Lauren Beley, spokes person for TicketLeap explained to me:
There’s a flurry of innovation by smaller ticketing companies serving smaller venues, venues too small for Ticketmaster to notice, and this innovation is already starting to move upstream toward medium-to-large venues.
She said that TicketLeap is one of these smaller ticketing companies that’s quickly moving upstream.
We started as a web company doing only online ticketing, but in the process, we learned from our venue customers that on site ticketing was broken in many ways. It required lots of expensive and proprietary equipment, it only worked in a traditional box office–not at a high school sporting event, or an outdoor festival, or a one-off expo, to name a few examples–and was very poorly integrated with the web. For consumers and venues, the fees were way too high.
We decided to build the first entirely web-based venue ticketing system, TicketLeap Anywhere, that works in a web browser on any computer. It’s radically less expensive for the venues and consumers because there’s no expensive equipment to buy, it’s totally portable and works anywhere you can take a mobile broadband card, and it’s tightly integrated with the online buying experience. It includes ticket barcode scanning, the ability for customers to choose their exact seat (like on an airplane) and support for all sorts of venue customization.
As companies like ours continue to move upstream in the next few years, it’s simply not going to be possible for
Ticketmaster and the larger players to continue their current business practices and pricing. Competition from companies like us will force them to behave better and will create a much more consumer-friendly ticketing industry.
So there, you have it, for your next event, pay less, but look professional.
Ramon Ray is the editor and tech evangelist for Smallbiztechnology.com