Ticketing without borders

Many travellers are now booking both travel arrangements and tickets for events and entertainment at their chosen destination at the same time. At BCD Entertainment we deliver live entertainment, event, sports and sightseeing content to BCD Travel and Travix International customers (travel-focused websites including CheapTickets, BudgetAir and EasyToBook.com). When we launched the company we aimed to offer a wide variety of tickets to these sales channels, but most importantly, I wanted our staff to focus on contracting events at key travel destinations worldwide and on marketing these events to travellers rather than spend most of their time on administration. I knew from previous experience that the traditional allocation model carries an enormous overhead in staff who neither contract nor sell tickets, and I was convinced that a better way must exist if we could harness the best available technology.

This enables us to provide our sales channels with access to a wide range of tickets to sell alongside other travel elements

We deal with a very large number of suppliers of tickets worldwide and a huge number of travellers, so we needed an infrastructure which could handle the volume and produce reliable information for suppliers and our marketing teams − with minimal administration. We selected a joint solution proposed by Enta and Ingresso, as together they allow us to sell tickets without a lot of the traditional administration, tapping live into venue inventory through Ingresso’s TicketSwitch platform. This enables us to provide our sales channels with access to a wide range of tickets to sell alongside other travel elements and to manage branding and pricing and provide venues and producers with access to new audiences with minimal administration.

Enta has given us a solid and reliable ticketing platform, with reports trusted by producers and venues alike, and with outstanding support. It has connectivity to our packaging platforms for sales and to TicketSwitch for the supply of tickets. We have control over pricing and can make different tickets available in different sales channels when we wish. For events where the venue does not have a ticketing system which is open to access by distribution partners, we can hold allocations on enta in the traditional way. For events where the venue’s system does support direct access by distribution partners, we can access contracted tickets via Ingresso’s TicketSwitch platform, with the sale and reporting managed on our enta system. This will allow venues to grant us access to tickets with almost no administration and to monitor our sales in real time on their own system.

This system is exciting as it breaks down the borders between travellers and venues, introducing more travellers to entertainment at their chosen destination.

Bart van Schriek is Chief Executive Officer of BCD Entertainment.