Digital ticketing has played an essential role in enabling Covid-safe events and now suppliers are exploring how their technology can be used to help provide a seamless user experience during mass Covid testing scenarios prior to full-capacity events.

The Covid-19 crisis has sparked innovation in many quarters, not least the ticketing sector. Leading operators are developing technology that may well play a significant role in the return of full-capacity events.

In the meantime, pre-existing digital ticketing technology is perfectly suited to helping to enable Covid-safe event environments.

Kilimanjaro Live CEO and Concert Promoters Association vice chairman Stuart Galbraith, whose company owns and operates events including the 20,000-capacity Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival, believes the industry-wide adoption of digital tickets is well overdue.

“While there is a vaccine, it’ll be going to the vulnerable and elderly first so we need a solution in place in order for events and festivals to happen next summer.”

He says, “As an event producer and promoter, in the last 10 years it’s been a huge frustration for me that we as an industry could have been delivering a better service to customers if everyone had agreed a protocol where electronic ticketing would be acceptable across the board and scanning and access control systems would take input from everybody that sold a ticket.

“Because of the politics of ticketing, and the landgrab of inventory, various companies have refused to do that and as a result have perpetuated the necessity for a customer to have a piece of paper stuffed in an envelope and sent to their house. The airline industry worked out 10 years ago that you don’t need a physical ticket.

“I think the pandemic will see the death of the paper ticket, at last, and good riddance to it.”

Read the feature in full in the January edition of Access All Areas here.

Subscribe to Access All Areas for free here.