Special feature - Just the ticket!

Selling tickets to the World

March 2008

The Booth, the online ticketing service for the Highlands and Islands, was developed and launched by HI~Arts in late 2004.  Since then, it has gone from strength to strength, allowing even the smallest, rurally-based event promoter to sell tickets online to the wider world.  The Booth's Director, Fiona Carr, takes a look back over three successful years.

With the birthday candles extinguished and the party hats packed away for another year, it’s hard to believe that thebooth (www.thebooth.co.uk) has already celebrated its third birthday. So let’s take a little time to look back and reflect on how far the online ticketing portal for the Highlands & Islands has come since its conception early in September 2004, and what the future holds for the friendly, customer focused website.
 

HI~Arts, the arts development agency for the Highlands and Islands, secured funding for an online ticketing portal from Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Scottish Arts Council and European Regional Development Fund. Its aim was to create an online ticketing portal to provide entry level online ticketing for all arts and cultural organisations across the region - and so thebooth was born - an easy-to-use and affordable online ticketing service allowing organisations to sell tickets online regardless of size, turnover or technical know-how. 

Whether you are an event promoter, sports team, visitor attraction, conference organiser, Theatre Company, festival or venue, thebooth caters for everyone’s needs.  The service has been designed for simplicity, both for the ticket seller and their customers and can be easily integrated with any website.
 

We are often asked the question - why sell tickets online? The answer to this is simple – thebooth offers customers an easy way to book tickets for your events 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.   This means that regardless of the customer's location, your ‘box office’ is always open, as well as relieving the pressure on the usual phone and over-the-counter bookings services.  No more queuing in that sideways rain the Highlands holds so dear, we aim to having the driest customers in town!

With a bright friendly logo and a real sense of pride in its customer service policy, thebooth has come along way in those three years since it took its first shaky steps onto centre stage of the online ticketing world, selling tickets for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s visit to Moray in January 2005.
 

So, fast forward three years, and thebooth has now sold over 100,000 tickets at a value of 1.8 million pounds, for 5500 events at 450 different venues, and we have a whole lot of satisfied customers.  thebooth has come a long way in cementing itself as a real contender in the ticketing arena. 

Starting 2008 as an independent company trading under Booth Scotland Ltd, we are now able to offer our services across Scotland, specifically providing a service to all those organisations for which an online box office has seemed like a distant dream.
 

However, thebooth has remained rooted in its aim to give arts and cultural organisations greater access to current and potential markets, enhancing their ability to collect customer data and allowing them to market their events and services more directly and cost-effectively to their customers.  By using culture as an economic driver, and the ongoing advances of Information and Communications Technology, thebooth continues to help cultural organisations across Scotland to attract cultural tourism at a national and international level by allowing them better means of collaboration and joint-promotion.

We are proud that organisations and projects in even the most fragile communities in Scotland are now able to compete on a more even playing field with their urban competitors. Through easy access to increased databases, organisations can now extract practical examples of where their audiences have come from, how often they attend and how far in advance they have booked.  On top of this they also have the ability to email their customers directly with news on up and coming shows and any new developments.  Experience has shown that thebooth and its functionality has successfully increased the catchment area for a number of local promoters.
 

Britain's only mobile cinema, the Screen Machine (another project of HI~Arts) has benefited greatly from using thebooth to handle its ticketing needs.  Many of the screenings now sell out in advance through the system which in turn eases the pressure on the staff and makes entry into the cinema on film nights a more fluid and efficient process.  In addition to this, the Screen Machine manager is now able to email his customers directly with news of up and coming screenings.

Now one of Europe’s leading ticketing facilities and continuing to push technology boundaries, thebooth offers the opportunity to manage your own ticket sales, effectively providing a real time box office. Primarily working as a ticket-less operation and providing the customer with a booking reference number for entry to events, much like Easyjet, we have since expanded our service and now send out tickets to a number of large events, particularly the high profile festivals in the Highlands and Islands.
 

Screen Machine 2 Mobile Cinema

2008 looks to be the busiest most exciting year yet for thebooth.  With a system upgrade aiming to produce a slicker, faster web experience for the customer, as well as added and more dynamic functionality for the contracted organisations.

Throughout the three years of the project, thebooth has been able to support a range of organisations both within the Highlands and Islands and beyond. From one off events in village halls, to Internationally renowned summer festivals to conferences and summer schools dotted around the countryside.  As thebooth continues to grow in stature and starts to plan for its future in the market place, we look to focusing in further on the technological advances and a push towards engaging further with audiences and organisations the length and breadth of the country. March 2008 sees us launch our very first monthly newsletter keeping our customers up to date with all the exciting events that can be booked online as well as any site updates and developments.

The service's snowball effect across the country, has meant these last few years have been, hectic, informative, exciting and satisfying in equal measures.  With next year celebrating Homecoming 2009 and offering up a rich cross section of events, alongside the countless events annually taking place across Scotland, we can’t imagine slowing down in the next  three!

Fiona Carr
Box Office Manager
Booth Scotland Ltd
March 2008