Booking system failure causes five week delay in sending out fringe tickets

Published Monday 14 July 2008 at 11:35 by Thom Dibdin

Full coverage of the Edinburgh Festivals

Tickets for this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe bought through the fringe’s website will start to be sent out this Wednesday, more than five weeks late, according to organisers.

The delay in sending out tickets is one of the results of the failure of the fringe’s new ‘Liquid Box Office’ booking system which crashed as soon as tickets for this year’s festival went on sale in June. The new system, which will cost £350,000 over the next five years is being installed by the Glasgow-based company Pivotal Integration.

Following problems, the fringe office reverted to a web-based ticketing system, which eventually went live for sales on June 13.

Fringe spokesman Duncan Fraser said: “Basically everything about the Pivotal system worked to a certain extent, but it was slower than expected when it was launched. The backup system is run by Kryer which is our web agency. It will be supporting our return to the Pivotal system. We are hoping to use the whole system in the future.”

While festival-goers were inconvenienced by the late start of ticket sales, early failures in the reporting functions of the alternative system once it went online also caused serious problems for fringe producers and venues who were not able to ascertain how many tickets had been sold through the fringe.

For venues which have their own online ticketing systems, this created potential for overselling tickets. Producers were not able to find out how much income they had already got from shows.

Fringe director Jon Morgan told The Stage: “After initial problems with a new box office system we launched an alternative web-based ticketing system to restore ticket sales.

“Because we moved to an alternative system, there was a delay in implementing the reporting functionality for our performers and producers. As of July 3, we launched a reporting function that displays how many tickets have been sold and how many tickets are left on sale. We are continuing to work on our reporting capability and hope to add more detail to our reports in future.”