Tore Totland

Tore Totland

Tore Totland, chairman of the Norwegian ticketing company TicketCo, reacts on our feature on paperless ticketing and comments on the future of this sector. 

“The paper ticket is not dead. Long live the paper ticket!,” claims Ticket Zone COO Wayne Munday in an article by Access All Areas. As a newcomer in the UK ticketing market, we couldn’t disagree more.

As far as TicketCo sees it, it is not only the paper ticket which is dead. We consider ticketing as we know it as dead, and quite frankly we are surprised that Ticket Zone, Skiddle and Eventbrite sees it otherwise.

So who is TicketCo?

TicketCo was established as a simple self-service ticketing solution in Norway a few years back but has grown to be much more.

Driven by a firm belief that event payments should be easy to handle by both organisers and their vast audience, we have developed what we consider will be the first global standard for all event payments.

Of course, it can be nice to keep a slick paper ticket in the wallet for a week or two after a great concert or football match, as a souvenir, like Ticket Zone suggests, is amongst the benefits with paper tickets. Far more important though, is the event itself.

It’s true, like Joel Crouch of Eventbrite states, that some countries still struggle with a somewhat tech-resistant population, but overall people love their smartphones.

We have experienced nothing but good in the years we’ve been serving the Norwegian audience with digital tickets, and we have the same impression of the UK audience after our launch here a few months back.

More important though, is the broader picture. Whether the ticket is on paper or on the phone is not that much of a difference, as long as it’s just a ticket. That is why we consider ticketing as dead in the long run.

While our competitors are offering ticketing systems, TicketCo offers a unified platform for efficient event payments. This is, in fact, a major difference.

Up until today, organisers have struggled with diversified sales systems, leading to loads of additional work and cumbersome customers journeys. We have killed this pain point and developed a truly user-friendly system that handles all kinds of event payments.

This means that our organisers can offer both food and beverages, transportation, accommodation, merchandise and whatever else as an integrated part of their tickets, which of course leads to increased sales.

We launched this innovation in Norway last summer, as a test, limited to a few selected festivals only. The feedback from both the organisers and the audience was overwhelming, and for the upcoming season, this unified platform will be available for all our organisers – both in UK and Norway.

That means that ticketing (as we know it) in fact is dead and that there now is a new ball game going on. Frankly, this is what should concern Ticket Zone, Skiddle and Eventbrite the most right now.