ts.com

Award winning ticketing solution for the Peel Bay Festival

In early June 2007, the Isle of Man rocked to the sounds of an eclectic mix of music including The Who, Madness, Robin Gibb, Ronan Keating and the Sugababes as part of the 100th anniversary celebrations for the island’s historic TT motorcycle event.  Over 25,000 tickets were sold for the Peel Bay Festival all purchased through ts.com’s ts Web ticketing solution.

ts Web - the flexible solution
In 2005, Isle of Man company and event organisers, Street Heritage Events Limited, revived a famous event from the 1960s, the Isle of Man Viking Festival.  The following year they expanded the event to include a 2 night music festival, next to the Viking Village.  Being successful in selling 5,000 tickets, they decided that they needed a booking system to manage their ticketing and considered trying to build their own system. However, as the 2007 100th anniversary of the Isle of Man TT Festival approached and with up to 60,000 visitors expected on the island, they decided to organise a much larger festival over the 7 nights, and the Peel Bay Festival was born. 

Street Heritage Event Ltd felt that the booking system had to be an integral part of their event and ts Web was selected because of the flexibility it offered, the response from initial discussions with ts.com and market research which showed that ts.com were most suited to this scale and feel of event. Street Heritage Events Ltd were particularly impressed with the way that ts.com had worked with the Cornbury Festival.
 

Ticketing and integrated marketing support
ts.com offered Street Heritage Event Ltd ts Web to handle the ticketing and provide integrated marketing support for the Peel Bay Festival as well as other events including the 22nd year of  Shakespeare at Peel Castle event, which they also organised.  ts Web was implemented to handle online sales, telephone sales, outlet and walk-up sales and enable them to handle their own ticket fulfilment.

The planning stage started in November 2006 with the objective of getting set up and selling tickets online as soon as possible.  A member of the ts.com customer service team flew over to the Isle of Man to provide training. 

Ticketing challenges and training support
John Shakespeare, Event Manager for the events takes up the story. “ts.com offers a range of additional training options that unfortunately we were not able to take full advantage of because of the cost and time involved in travelling to the mainland, but the ts.com customer service team were brilliant on the phone and helped us to set up the system and get it live in time for us to launch the first act on the 12th December.  We had a staged release of the tickets to give us more opportunity to market each act, and we really put the system to the test in the January when we released the McFly tickets as we sold 3,500 in one day.

The venue for our festival was very unusual and a unique feature of the whole event as the marquee was the second largest temporary structure ever erected in Great Britain.  Our capacity for each event was 10,000, with 5,000 numbered seats and a standing area of the same capacity.  And for one of the days, when the group Madness were performing, we took out all the seats.  In addition to these seating plan changes we had a complicated range of different price categories and reservations required.  However, out of the 7 nights of the festival we didn’t have any duplicates despite the volumes sold, which was a credit to the effectiveness of the system.”

The benefits of integrated marketing
The organisers were able to take good advantage of the marketing and membership features that are integrated into ts Web.  They had an existing database which was pre-loaded into ts Web and had a ‘keep me posted’ feature on their website for fans to register their interest in the event, enabling them to run promotions, priority booking and offers to previous purchasers as tickets for each date of the festival were released.

“We used the database marketing that ts Web offered us very successfully.” John comments.  “Festival goers were able to pre-register their interest before tickets went on sale, and were able then to get a preferential pre-booking period before the tickets went on general sale.  This proved a very effective way to build our database.  In addition to the various event tickets on sale, we later complicated the offering when we added in car parking and camping options to our kiosk, selling camping or vehicle space and a variety of tents and sleeping rolls.  But despite all these complications the system worked extremely well.

Online sales in multiple languages
“Another major advantage of ts Web for us was the ability for it to have multiple languages in the kiosk.  As up to 20% of the fans at the TT are German our line up featured Chris Norman who is massively popular in Germany, consequently this was a very popular night for ticket sales and we really benefited from being able to sell online in multiple languages.  We had fans from the US, Australia, France and Japan booking online through our website.
 
As ts Web is internet based we were able to set up ticket sales kiosks in the main towns around the island connected to the live booking system to take walk up sales, but 80% of our tickets were sold online or over the phone.

Promotional support
Using the marketing functionality in ts Web we were able to run various different email offers, with discounts for pre-registered fans and offers for people who had already booked for one of the dates when new dates were released.  We were able to run and track competitions in the media targeted at TT fans, such as with The Motorcycle News and they had an excellent response rate.  Another very successful feature was the ability to link from the artists own website to the ticket sales which brought in a lot of sales especially from the official Madness website.”

With headline acts such as The Who, Madness and McFly, the total number of tickets sold for the festival topped 25,000, not including camping or car parking.  Volume of tickets sold for three of the nights topped 6,000.

Award winning system
The success of the Street Heritage Events Ltd’s investment in the ticketing system was officially recognised when they won the Isle of Man Post Office sponsored award for Effective Use of IT at the 2007 Isle of Man Newspapers Awards for Excellence. The award was given as a result of the implementation of the ticketing system, the use of the database and integrated marketing tools and the effectiveness of ts Web with no double bookings during the 7 nights of the festival.

John Shakespeare concludes “We learnt from experience in previous years that trying to implement our own systems was not the way forward - we needed a company that could respond to our unique challenges and ts.com did this.  One of the most important factors was the relationship with key members of the ts.com team and being able to work through any issue that came up effectively and without any fuss. As an online ticketing system I can thoroughly recommend ts Web.”