Welcome back NASCAR fans!

NASCAR is welcoming fans back, by invitation only, to the racetrack this month with open arms. It’s a different experience than we are used to, with a reduced capacity at the speedways, and new social distance seating measures in place, but NASCAR and Tickets.com have been working tirelessly to bring back what the world has sorely missed: live events.

NASCAR is one the first live sports partner at Tickets.com to open up seating under social distancing guidelines. President and CEO Joe Choti commented,

“We are excited to bring our ProVenue and MyProVenue technology solutions to NASCAR in order to get fans back into seats. With a safety-first approach, gate entry, seating configuration, and ticket sales have been arranged in new ways”.

Allowing fans to get back into the driver’s seat of live events safely is paramount. On June 14^th, Homestead Miami Speedway is hosting a fan event with complimentary tickets for the U.S. Military by invitation only, and on June 21^st, Talladega Superspeedway is hosting an event for current in-state ticket holders by invitation only. Both events have been setup using existing ProVenue features which allow ticket sales in ProVenue and MyProVenue that adhere to social distancing guidelines.

The tracks are organized using social distance guidelines, including staggered entry and seating arrangements to keep groups of fans at a distance, even on the campgrounds.

And of course, NASCAR fans will look a little different with face masks.

Tickets.com supports several ways for venues to handle the new normal, including contactless ticketing with NFC (Near Field Communications) which allows for less touch points at venue entry. Patrons just present their tickets that they stored as “passes” in Apple® Wallet or Google Pay® near a scanning location for entry – no barcode or contact with venue staff needed.

NASCAR and Tickets.com are on the road to new wins by bringing back fans.

For more information on Social Distance Seating, check out our news article. If you are interested in adding these services to your venue please contact Sales@tickets.com or your Client Services Representative.

Memorial Day: Remember & Honor

Today we honor the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice serving our nation. We also would like to recognize the U.S. military, our veterans, and all of the first responders on this day.

Experience is everything to us at Tickets.com. Through our T.Cares initiative, we partner with non-profit organizations to build unforgettable event experiences for individuals and their families. Throughout the years we have gifted experiences to our military heroes with the help of the non-profit organization, Vet Tix.

One of our most unforgettable experiences was in Surprise, Arizona. This year we had the pleasure of inviting service members, veterans, first responders, and their families to join us in Surprise, Arizona at Surprise Stadium for seven Baseball Spring Training games through Vet Tix. As baseball fans wait for the season to come, we remember these special moments.

Our honored guests were given premium seats, ‘Baseball Bucks’, a public announcement, and as a special tribute, each guest took to the mound and threw out the first pitch before each of the seven games.

Thank you to Vet Tix for this memory, we look forward to building new experiences with you again soon.

About Vet Tix:

Vet Tix * provides tickets to events which reduce stress, strengthen family bonds, build life-long memories and encourage service members and veterans to stay engaged with local communities and American life. We support our troops by honoring their service and providing positive family and life experiences, during and after their years of service to our country.

If you have the means to do so, please take a minute and donate to our friends, an amazing organization that supports Veterans and first responders across the country, Vet Tix – donate link https://www.vettix.org/donate.php

NASCAR is back!

DARLINGTON, SC – Sunday, NASCAR made history in becoming the first major U.S. sport to restart. Without fans on site, the grandstands will be empty. But today, hearts are pounding to the beat of live sports programming on television.

Tickets.com is proud that ProVenue supports at all 13 NASCAR race tracks and we look forward to a quick turn recovery to bringing fans back into the stands. Until then, we will continue to tailgate safely at home.

To learn more about our feature products, please visit provenue.tickets.com.

Tickets.com technology is ready for Social Distance Seating

As the country and globe phase into a new normal, venues are struggling to adapt seating to new ticketing and seating scenarios. Tickets.com has been busy sharing information with clients to educate them on the existing capabilities of the ProVenue^® system to better prepare them for upcoming events.

“We always want to provide venues with options,” commented Derek Argobright, Chief Technology Officer at Tickets.com. “Venues wishing to adhere to social distancing guidelines can leverage ProVenue’s native support for Social Distance Seating. Our products are easy-to-configure and able to support both back office and online sales.”

What is Social Distance Seating?

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a need for people from different households to maintain a safe and respectful physical distance to reduce any risk of cross-contamination. At events, this means that patrons will have to enter the venue using social distancing guidelines and be seated where no one in any single party is within a pre-determined distance from another party.

Venue Entry Considerations:

Staggered physical entry into the venue and seating area(s) allows patrons to enter in a way that adheres to safe distance practices.
Self-service (unattended) entry kiosks provide a means for ticket validation without the need for interaction with a nearby attendant.

Seating Configuration:

Within a specific row, considerations may require whether a given party of patrons should have to pass by another party to get to their seats. Depending on the size of parties, that might mean that no more than two parties can be seated in the same row.
Within the same row, a specific number of empty seats may need to be maintained between parties.
Potentially, a party sitting in a specific row should not have any party sitting in a row directly in front or behind their seating location.

Each organization will need to evaluate their venue configuration to determine adherence to appropriate governmental guidelines.

With ProVenue and MyProVenue™ venues can manage entry by configuring seats with specific entry and time slot details. Each ticket can have an assigned group number printed on it, used to stagger entry into the venue.

The dynamic nature of the Tickets.com Social Distance Seating capabilities is unique. Clients have powerful and flexible options when it comes to re-opening events under social distancing guidelines.

Social Distance Seating employs Hold Codes to determine which seats are available for sale and which remaining seats to block when a set of contiguous seats is locked for sale. For example, if a party of five purchases seats from a group of six seats, the remaining seat will dynamically be blocked from sale.

Sports and entertainment organizations face new challenges to provide safe and secure venues for live events. Utilizing existing features available today in products from Tickets.com gives venues the needed flexibility and functionality to enable Social Distance Seating.

Learn more at Provenue.tickets.com

Ready, Set…Racing Returns in New Ways

Tickets.com is revved up that live sports are starting to begin.

KNOXVILLE, LA – Last Friday, amidst the empty stadiums of Knoxville Raceway, the first races hit the tracks. The World of Outlaws kick-started a feeling that has remained dormant for so long.

Since COVID-19 forced the shutdown of live sports back in March, fans have been waiting for this moment. With new adjustments in protocols—including empty stadiums, social distancing, temperature checks, face masks, and a sea of hand-sanitizer— this live race is a pivotal step in the road to recovery for sports.

Check out the video coverage of this historic first step set by the World of Outlaws:

Indianapolis Indians See New Possibilities with CrowdConnectPlus

Founded in 1902 The Indianapolis Indians are a professional Minor League Baseball team based in the International League and the Triple-A affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Indians play at Victory Field in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana.

Recently, the Indianapolis Indians, upgraded their email marketing services from CrowdConnect™ to CrowdConnectPlus with Tickets.com. The decision to upgrade was based on seeking more advanced ways to efficiently market upcoming events to their patrons and increase their engagement.

In the fast-moving ticketing space, email is a powerful tool. Email is naturally more captive and provides a direct link to patrons. Building that relationship requires the right tools to create, execute, and track email campaigns, according to the Shayla Smith, Digital Marketing Manager at the Indianapolis Indians, commented that,

“CrowdConnect is so easy to use. Building campaigns requires no prior coding experience. The backend of campaign building is user-friendly and has a great creative library with the ability to reuse hex codes.”

From custom fields to segmentation tools, there is so much opportunity with CrowdConnect to engage patrons with a cadence. All of which was not fully realized until the Indianapolis Indians, added CrowdConnectPlus. According to Matt Guay, Assistant General Manager of Tickets and Operations “our biggest challenge is to integrate with ProVenue^®.”

Now the Indianapolis Indians have the ability to tap into ProVenue patron information seamlessly. By directly synchronizing with ProVenue, CrowdConnectPlus removes the need to work in two systems, automates manual processes, and provides the Indianapolis Indians with key patron data points from ProVenue to optimize campaign performance. Since launching on CrowdConnectPlus, Smith state segmentation us improving and,

“Open rates and click rates are higher and people are buying things more readily.”

In the upcoming season, the Indianapolis Indians look forward to increasing use of A/B testing, building more if/when statements, increasing the number of advanced segments, and re-targeting.

To find out more on CrowdConnect and CrowdConnectPlus, please contact Marketing@tickets.com

To find out more about ProVenue and MyProVenue^™, visit provenue.tickets.com

Follow Up on COVID-19

As the COVID situation continues to unfold, we are humbled by the contributions of our health organizations and caregivers around the world.

If your organization is working to aid during this trying time and is struggling with online challenges, connect with us. We have the technology to handle high volume responses and are willing and able to help. Contact Us.

ProVenue Exchange 2020

In light of the current global situation and the venue availability we are postponing ProVenue Exchange to later this year. For more venue information, please click here.

Scheduling Events

While millions around the world are ordered to stay home to minimize the risks of spreading COVID-19, many major events have been postponed throughout the globe. We continue to monitor developments in cooperation with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the World Health Organization (WHO), state, and local agencies as it becomes increasingly important to stay connected.

We strongly encourage everyone to follow national and local guidelines to protect themselves and their communities. If your venue is anticipating cancelling or postponing a paid ticketed event, we ask that you please alert your Tickets.com representative as soon as possible in order to coordinate issuing patron account credits or refunds should you choose to do so.

Our incident response team is monitoring the situation and remains in contact with our global organization, including: sales, operations, support, and engineering. We are committed to being available for our clients and partners. To that end, we encourage you to connect with us. Contact Us.

Ticketed Events

If you have questions with regard to any impacted event please contact the venue directly.

As a reminder, our offices and data centers around the globe remain open and operational. Our customer support organization will maintain the same level of service excellence for our clients, partners, and patrons despite the uncertainty of COVID-19.

In whatever way you might be coping, know that you are not alone. We’re in this together.

Thank you for the trust and confidence you have in Tickets.com, its products and services.

JF Choti
President & CEO
Tickets.com

Further inquiries can be sent to: COVID-19ResponseTeam@Tickets.com.

Please see the latest information COVID-19 on the following sites:
Centers for Disease Control
World Health Organization

Central Michigan University Sees Success with Tickets.com

Central Michigan University (CMU), began its partnership with Tickets.com in July of 2019. With a packed schedule of CMU athletic events and performing arts shows across nine venues, over 165,000 patrons enjoy a live experience on campus each year. CMU upgraded to the ticketing platform ProVenue^® from Tickets.com at the start of 2019 to improve the patron experience and help increase attendance at all events.

Chantel Barger, Assistant Director of Ticket Central, said,

“Since we began working with Tickets.com, our processes have become much more efficient. ProVenue has been a real time-saver for us as we can build events and set up access control all in one place. Our students and visitors have also been very positive about the move because the platform is so user-friendly, and the entire customer experience is so much better. We are extremely impressed with the technology and everyone at Tickets.com, and we’re really excited for what new features are to come.”

Barger noted that MyProVenue^™ has really helped build “self-service” capabilities for patrons. For example, Ticket Forwarding in MyProVenue allows patrons to forward a purchased ticket to a friend or family member and sends an email confirmation to both parties without engaging the box office. MyProVenue also allows the patron to recall the ticket or send it back to their account if the friend or family member cannot attend the event.”

Event-entry has also gotten seamless for CMU. According to Barger, since CMU added Alfred powered ticket scanning devices from Tickets.com, event-entry has become “a breeze.” Alfred is the ticket validation solution from Tickets.com that works seamlessly with ProVenue and MyProVenue.

Bucky Heath, Head of Marketing at Tickets.com, said, “We are delighted to be working with CMU as they are a great example of how our advanced technology can help an organization improve its processes and provide an unrivalled digital ticketing experience for its patrons.”

To find out more about ProVenue and MyProVenue, visit provenue.tickets.com

StellarAlgo and the Registered Developer Program

StellarAlgo joined the Tickets.com Registered Developer Program (RDP) two years ago and has garnered impressive successes in that time. The information available through the RDP complements the innovative Customer Data Platform from StellarAlgo, which helps professional sports and entertainment organizations better understand their fans in order to maximize engagement and revenue.

StellarAlgo’s best-in-class platform allows partners to collate unique data sets into a single customer view to better segment and understand their audiences. From there, the platform predicts patrons’ likelihood to engage with different products and messaging while unlocking valuable insights into patron preferences which partners can action immediately. Making data accessible, timely, and actionable helps their partners get the right marketing message to the right fans at the right time.

Regarding the program and the benefits for StellarAlgo, Vincent Ircandia, Founder and CEO at StellarAlgo explained: “We have created a great partnership with Tickets.com and access to the well-structured data sets and API’s has made our developers’ lives a lot easier.

“The rich data that is provided by ProVenue excites us since our mutual customers are all looking to predict fan behavior. We can develop the data sets to provide predictive fan insights, enabling the venues and organizations to reach a bigger target audience.”

StellarAlgo applied to join the Registered Developer Program for a number of reasons, including the advanced technology solutions provided by Tickets.com, and the clients Tickets.com works with.

Vincent continued:

“Tickets.com has such as broad array of sports and entertainment properties, and has been doing a great job in those sectors that we also have a vested interest in. So the collaboration made complete sense. We see what we’re doing as ‘data for good’, and this aligns well with the Tickets.com mission to help grow fan relationships and offer great experiences at venues across the country by understanding audiences better.”

The Tickets.com Registered Developer Program allows verified third-party solutions to seamlessly integrate with the ProVenue® ticketing platform, providing partner venues with limitless access to the most advanced ticketing technology. By utilizing the technology infrastructure as the foundation, the program unites venue personnel, third-party developers and ProVenue experts in collaboration to build reimagined experiences and unsurpassed value to patrons.

Chris Farrar, Director, Product & Partner Management at Tickets.com commented:

“Our work with the StellarAlgo platform has seen our customers improve their engagement with patrons, and is really becoming a key differentiator in growing a dedicated following or fan base.”

To find out more about the Registered Developer Program please contact devsupport@tickets.com or click here for more information.

Tickets.com® and 3D Digital Venue Bring ‘3D View from Seat’ to Globe Life Field

Globe Life Field, the new home to the Texas Rangers™ beginning in 2020, has been optimized to improve the experience of season ticket holders using 3D technology. Tickets.com, through its innovative Registered Developer Program, has partnered with 3D Digital Venue™ to bring 3D design technology to the online sales experience for the Rangers.

At inception, Globe Life Field was designed with aspirations to be a state-of-the-art venue for Rangers fans and Major League Baseball. 3D Digital Venue worked on this ambitious endeavor using architectural 3D modeling and virtual reality to create the ideal construction plan for the team’s new ballpark. As part of an overall commitment to utilize advanced technologies, 3D visualization was utilized to resolve potential issues with restricted seat views and undetected design spots, allowing the Rangers to perfect seat positioning at an early stage of development.

3D Digital Venue uses technology to analyze and understand an accurate seat view. This technology improved the design for Globe Life Field by adjusting the seat placement for season ticket holders in order to maximize views and enhance the overall experience. Tickets.com and 3D Digital Venue have partnered to apply this 3D design technology to ticketing, optimizing the experience for patrons purchasing tickets online via the MyProVenue interface.

The 3D Digital Venue platform uses video-game engines to generate a 3D virtual reality representation of a venue, as well as a 360° view from each seat. The seat selection journey starts with a bird’s eye view of the venue, where the user is able to pick a seating section. Once a section is selected, MyProVenue displays seat tiles containing pricing details, as well as an icon for displaying a 3D view from the selected seat. The 360° seat view provides venues with increased visibility of the property, the ability to sell premium areas and provide powerful information to share with performers.

3D Digital Venue is a member of the Tickets.com Registered Developer Program. “Through the support within Registered Development Program at Tickets.com,” explains Lluis Pascual, CMO at 3D Digital Venue™, “we have solved issues and are delivering the best experience possible.”

The Registered Developer Program at Tickets.com benefits both venues and third-party solution providers. Developers access the tools necessary to seamlessly integrate their technology with the ProVenue® platform. The program’s REST-based APIs provide partners with real-time access to critical data, helping them continuously innovate ticketing solutions.

Pascual added that client relations have improved as well.

“Being part of the Registered Developer Program has helped us to have a deeper understanding of client needs and have a strong relationship with them.”

Globe Life Field is expected to open for the 2020 season.
To learn more about the new Texas Rangers or Globe Life Field, visit MLB.com.

To learn more about 3D Digital Venue™, visit 3ddigitalvenue.com and view the 3D Digital Venue Service Guide.

To learn more about how Tickets.com is transforming the future of ticketing through the Registered Development Program, visit provenue.com.