Really Useful venues to roll out home-printed tickets

Published Tuesday 16 January 2007 at 15:40 by Nuala Calvi

Britain’s second largest ticketing company is to introduce print-at-home and mobile phone ticket sales for the theatre sector, in a move it claims will ease box office queues and help stamp out ticket fraud.

See Tickets has already trialled print-at-home ticketing with major events such as the Ideal Homes Exhibition but is now set to roll it out to venues in the Really Useful Group, with the Adelphi Theatre likely to offer the service within the next couple of months.

Customers will be able to buy tickets online and print off confirmation from their home computer which includes a barcode that can be read by ushers at the theatre using a handheld scanner. The system, which is already common on Broadway, cuts out the need to visit the box office on arrival and makes it harder to for tickets to be forged.

A similar system is already in operation at certain venues served by See Tickets’ rival Ticketmaster, including the Lyceum and the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

Nick Blackburn, managing director of See Tickets, told The Stage: “Print-at-home is something we’ve been doing since 2006 at venues like Earls Court but we are going to look at putting it into Really Useful-owned theatres. The big advantage is that it’s a more secure system because all tickets are barcoded. It’s particularly useful for last-minute buyers because you don’t have large queues for collection of tickets.”

A new service will also allow customers with internet access on their mobile phones to browse events and buy tickets on the move. Unlike previous mobile phone purchase systems that have been trialled in theatres, the service can be used via any phone network.

Meanwhile, technology solutions company the Telsecure Group is to launch a new ticketing system in February that offers the option to do away with paper tickets altogether and send a barcode to customers’ mobile phones by text message that can be scanned at the venue.

Although text message tickets are already used for events such as rock concerts, Secureticket claims to be the first ticketing system to have the service fully-integrated rather than as an add-on.

Ticketmaster has also trialled a new mobile ticket wireless delivery service in 2006, which it plans to offer to venues this year.

• See Tickets acquisition, Biz 2 Biz, page 13, issue date 18th January 2007