Five Life-Saving Tips about Ticketing Software for Fairs

We have occasionally helped large county fairs set up their ticketing.  This experience has taught us that fairs have a handful of unique ticketing requirements.  If you are looking for ticketing software for fairs, here are a few requirements that were critical for the fairs we worked with.

1. Integrate with daily deal marketing

Fairs will often run daily deals with Groupon, Living Social, or any other daily deal firms as a way to drive traffic to the fairs.  Customers will be arriving with coupons with barcodes, and your staff at the gate need to scan the barcodes to redeem the coupon and let people in.

At the same time, many customers will be purchasing tickets directly on your website using your ticketing solution.  Those tickets will also need to be scanned and redeemed.

You would want your fair ticketing software to be integrated with your daily deal coupon redemption software.  That is you don’t want your gate workers to have to use one application to redeem daily deal coupons and a different application for regular tickets.  You want them to be able to scan tickets for coupons, regardless of their source.

2.  Ticketing software for fairs must permit barcode redemption using smart phones

The people you employ to scan tickets at the gates will likely be mobile.  That is, they will not all be sitting in kiosks in front of computers.  You want the ability to have them standing at gate entrances with the ability to scan tickets on a mobile basis.  So you want them to be able to use tablets or smartphones.

On the other hand, you do not want them to be using their phones to scan QR codes.  It is much faster to scan barcodes.  Scanning a QR code requires a few seconds for the smart phone to focus on the QR code.  Scanning a barcode with a barcode reader is almost instantaneous.

The ideal solution combines a Bluetooth handheld barcode scanner connected to a smart phone or tablet running the ticketing redemption application.  Cool.  Fast.  Reliable.

3. Ability to show sale price and regular price

Most ticketing software systems simply list the price of the tickets.  We discovered that ticketing solutions for fairs often need to show 2 prices: the price that applies on the days of the fair, and a lower advanced purchase price.  Fairs like to be able to show customers buying in advance that they are getting a good deal.

Be sure that the ticketing solution you use for your fair has this ability.

And check popular weekly ads:
Kroger Weekly Ad, Target Ad, Walgreens weekly Ad, Meijer weekly Ad
Aldi Catalogue, Aldi Catalogue, Big w Catalogue, Bunnings Catalogue

4. Multiple redemptions

Since fares run multiple days, and tickets may be valid on each of the days, ticketing solutions for fairs must allow a ticket to be scanned and redeemed multiple times.  So if you are selling 4-day ticket passes, for example, you would want the ability to indicate in the system that the ticket can be redeemed 4 times.  Very few ticketing systems allow this.  They go on the basis that a ticket can only be redeemed once.

5. Many promotions

Fairs tend to offer many different promotions, each with its own unique promo code.  Some ticketing systems allow only a small number of promo codes.  Good ticketing solutions for fairs must allow many.  You do not want to have your marketing efforts restricted by your ticketing software.

Are you examining ticketing software for fairs?  Consider TicketPeak.

Leave A Reply