Integrating with PlayPass for cashless events
In this case study: How The TicketSellers integrates with PlayPass to facilitate cashless events
Introduction
Cashless events continue to grow in popularity across the festival sector, perhaps not as quickly as some predicted due to legitimate concerns held by customers and traders alike.
Nevertheless, there is a demand for wristbands pre-loaded with cash to help increase customer spending at events and we set about to ensure our clients could benefit from RFID technology.
The problem
IThe main challenge to be overcome when providing an integrated solution is ensuring that data is passed promptly and accurately from one system to another. In this case we, The TicketSellers, hold customer data (i.e. people who have bought tickets) and the cashless provider needs to provide a way for these customers to load funds onto their wristbands and access the event.
The added complexity in our case is Eventree, our crew and artist management platform. Changes to crew and artist bookings can change at the last minute, even while the event is physically taking place.
Finally, a small number of our customers still sell a handful of paper tickets at local outlets (think small village shops on the perimeter of the festival site). We wanted to make sure those customers could also benefit from cashless services at the event.
The solution
We chose PlayPass as a partner for this work after meeting and exhibiting alongside them at the AIF’s Festival Congress. It helped that at least one of our events was taking the plunge and asked us to connect the two systems for their customers.
Warning – some technical details follow…
We provide PlayPass with a JSON feed of ticketholder information from both customers, crew, and artists. This feed updates every 15 minutes to ensure that the information PlayPass is working with is as up to date as possible. PlayPass imports this information – including the all important barcode number for each ticket – into their own system which allows them to issue RFID wristbands to everyone attending the event.
Furthermore, once we know which wristband each ticketholder has been given we can link those in our system. One benefit of this is that crew can collect meals from the canteen using their RFID wristband, as indeed we did for Standon Calling who used Eventree for all the meal planning.
The results
Cashless isn’t an area we want to get involved in directly at this stage. We have an absolute wealth of experience in festival ticketing and crew/artist management, and we are on a mission to be the ticketing partner of choice for the independent festival sector.
By providing a simple integration with one of the biggest cashless providers in the UK we give our clients the opportunity to benefit from increased customer spending at their event whilst still being able to sell tickets using the platform most suited to their needs. Best of all, our clients don’t have to do anything to benefit from this except ask us and PlayPass to switch it on.