The Four Tenets of Ticketing
How ticketing should work in 2024 and why Paris left fans frustrated
The Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games were a smashing commercial success.
The ratings were through the roof, the venues were packed and sponsors are gleeful at the delivery.
The city was clean, safe, easy to get around, and the games themselves were beautiful.
The only significant blight: the ticketing process and system were, for lack of a better adjective, just bad.
Ticketing in 2024
Ticketing is really hard. I've been in and around the industry for 24 years now and have seen quite a bit.
We love our live events. They illicit emotions all over the spectrum. It's why we're so passionate about ticketing, as it is our ticket to what we love. As such, there are new entrants and ideas around ticketing (read: access control) sprouting up often to try and make the experience better.
The Olympics, and the ticketing around them, are on another level of complexity. They're large in scale, include venues of all sizes with different legacy technology and physical resource, move every two years, and serve an international fanbase coming from all over the globe.
Even with that understanding giving the games more leeway, Paris wasn't well executed.
There is so much demand, so many customers who aren't returning, and so much scarcity, that customers will tolerate just about anything to get tickets. The event comes and goes and the fans likely won't need to interact with the system again. As such, a ticketing system can be abjectly bad and still set records - as Paris did. They can mistreat customers and still claim success. But, as Papa Knopp would say, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
We have 18 months until Cortina 2026 and four years until LA 2028. Let's dig into the four tenets of great ticketing, explore where Paris missed, and talk about how we can build better processes and technology for our customers.
The Tenets:
Ticketing is an emotionally charged hot button topic when it comes to highly sought after events. We're naturally wired to want to be around one another and to experience events we care about together. The problem is, there's only so much any event can do to satisfy the market's demand to be at the event. There aren’t enough seats for everyone who wants to go.
Taylor Swift has played a staggering 152 dates in 2023 and could have sold out 500 more.
Paris 2024 was the first in-person Summer Olympic Games in eight years. And they were in Europe. Summer Games in Europe are seismically popular. Barcelona '92, Athens '04, and London '12 were box office smashes. We all knew Paris 2024 was going to be a hit given the location and the pent-up demand. Those building out the systems and processes knew what was coming.
Going into any event, there are a number of major decisions about access, on-sale, transferability, and re-sale to be made.
In English:
What tech are we going to use to sell tickets?
Where are we going to sell them?
When are we going to sell them?
Who gets to buy them?
Can they be transferred?
Can they be re-sold? If so, where? What re-sale rules will apply?
It is in these decisions that stakeholders get into trouble and build bad product. Each answer impacts the user’s experience.
Throughout history, vendors have tried endless ideas to attempt to make ticket sales fair, equitable, easy, and affordable for fans.
We put them on-sale at the box office where people can just line up. It's democratic, yes, but impossible for those of us with families and responsibilities. Having no responsibility doesn't make someone a bigger fan than another, it's simply a life choice.
We sold them online in a first-come-first-serve (FCFS) model where tickets were underpriced and affordable in the hopes real fans will buy them. Instead, brokers bought them all and a billion dollar industry grew around re-sale.
We required the credit card used to buy the tickets be present to enter the event. It made it impossible for parents to buy their teenage kids Hannah Montana tickets without having to use one for themselves and spoil the kids night.
We limited on-sale to local zip codes so opposing fans can't come to important games. It just made the re-sale market go crazy and encouraged fans who weren't going to sell to sell their tickets as the prices were so high.
And on and on. We have experience from nearly fifty years of ticket sales to lean on.
The one thing an event cannot do is impose rules or limitations which break the four tenets of ticketing in 2024. Once they break a tenet, fans get a bad experience.
Here are the four Tenets of Ticketing, what they mean, and how Paris broke all of them.
It is simple
It is convenient
It is clear
It works
The tenets sound so simple. Yet they are so difficult to adhere to with the many pressures and outside demands that come with a highly sought after and popular event. Billion dollar companies have been built by staying true to these tenets. (We're not a billion dollar company….yet. But we're pretty dang good at what we do, and the market agrees.)
The tenets are applicable for all forms of ticketing including physical. For the purposes of this article, we're going to apply them to Paris 2024, where ticketing was exclusively digital.
Tenet 1: It is simple
Can I buy a ticket without any instruction. If so, we're off to a great start.
E-commerce is a quarter century old. There are norms we all know. We like to call them "Generally Accepted Internet Principles" (GAIP). We have been trained by evolving e-commerce on how to shop online. The best are so "idiot-proof" we can go to their site and buy what we want so seamlessly it feels like we’ve done it before.
Can I go to a site, easily find the event I'd like to attend and see all options available to me in one place?
The experience for Paris 2024 was decidedly more complex and confusing.
Searching for tickets was unclear. The Olympics use codes for their events. If you talk to an Olympic superfan about the events they're going to attend, they'll tell you something like "I'm going to BKB029." Most of us don’t know what that means. And we shouldn’t have to.
A search for an event returns primary inventory available in a list alongside the more expensive hospitality packages. If a user chooses the hospitality package, they are taken away from the primary ticket site to another site with yet another search bar and it's own log-in information.
If the search didn't return any primary or hospitality inventory, the buyer could search on a third site, the Paris re-sale site, with its own search and log-in.
Three different websites with three different searches and three different log-ins is not simple.
There are times companies do silly things and we all wonder "was there not one person in that room full of executives who didn't see this and raise their hand?"
I will spend my life wondering the same about Paris 2024 and their three ticketing websites.
Tenet 2: It is convenient
A general rule of business: make it easy to buy your goods and services.
For most of us, consumers won't go to great lengths to buy our wares. We have to make it as easy as possible.
Sought after events don't have that problem. Fans will go to great lengths to buy tickets. That doesn't mean they should have to.
The idea of making it difficult to buy a ticket to somehow flesh out "who the true fans are" is misguided. As much as I'd like to spend a work day refreshing a webpage or standing in line, I have responsibilities. That doesn't make me less of a fan. It makes me a responsible adult.
A great ticketing system is convenient. Tickets go on-sale at the most convenient time and the time commitment asked of the buyer is reasonable. On-sales happen a reasonable number of times - no more than five per event.
We have terrific examples of on-sales done well where a band will have a VIP pre-sale, a fan club pre-sale, an on-sale, and a drop date. If a consumer wants to buy tickets, they log-in on those four dates and commit up to forty five minutes (at most) to try and get tickets. That means if I'm a superfan, the most that will be asked of me for one show is two hours. That is an enormous amount of time to buy a good that I won't be driving for years or living in, but a sacrifice most are willing to make for the events they love.
Even in today's information age, where teams and bands are collecting information about their buyers, consumers can flow through an experience. Remember, we all signed up for Amazon once before we got to one-click buying.
Paris 2024 was inconvenient for locals and borderline miserable for visiting guests asked to refresh a computer in the middle of the night on a workday months prior to the Games.
Tenet #3: It Is Clear
A consumer can clearly understand when tickets are available, how they can buy them, and what will be expected of them when on-sale occurs. .
If a ticketing site really nails it, the experience is clean and so GAIP the information is seamlessly communicated during the progression and feels like a warm educational nudge as opposed to hurdles in the way of an end goal or an instruction manual.
Clearly announce the event, the on-sale dates for the events, and where to buy tickets. No secrets. No games.
Once on-sale occurs, the experience of discovering, buying, and using the tickets is clear and simple.
Paris 2024 was not clear. Tickets were sold in "drops" which started off monthly, then weekly, then daily as the games approached.
If I wanted to buy the women's 3x3 event from our example, I would have no way of knowing when tickets for the event were being "dropped” for certain. I could be led to search for months.
Worse yet, Paris 2024 seemingly played off the lack of clarity like some sort of fun game, encouraging fans to log-in to drops as if logging into a Pokémon Go event to try to find rare figures.
Inviting the world to travel to your country at a great economic cost and then asking them to log-in at 2am repeatedly to get tickets without even knowing when the tickets they want to buy will be available is not clear. It is treating customers poorly and putting barriers in front of their buy process.
Too many people went to France and couldn't get tickets for anything they were passionate about. The games were just too “French.” And that just doesn't make much sense for a games of the world. There’s very little sense in 75% of the crowd being French at a USA vs. Japan volleyball match. That’s not the Olympics. That’s a France invitational.
Tenet #4: It Works
There is a wide chasm between dreaming up the best possibly ticketing experience and actually delivering on it.
One company after another has attempted to challenge the market with new ideas only to fold under the weight of enormous consumer demand for access to the event being sold.
The website needs to work.
At the most basic: the website needs to show a consumer what tickets are available in real-time, be reasonably fast, and enable the consumer to transact on those tickets.
We have the technology today to not only see tickets available but to see them on a virtual map in real time. This is the floor for 2024. All experiences should at least work.
Paris 2024 did not work. Especially the re-sale site.
Before we discuss the troubles with the primary and re-sale sites, I would like to give Paris 2024 their flowers where deserved: Once I got the tickets, the app was terrific. I could pull them up easily and scan them. The inventory management "wallet" feature was absolutely great. That is incredibly difficult to deliver and Paris did so wonderfully.
The primary site, the first of three, would constantly glitch on search and show tickets which weren't actually available. Over and over. They would appear, disappear, then reappear. Same tickets, same search.
The re-sale site would do the same, only much more regularly. One person after another would lament how inventory would show as available and then disappear in the sales process only to reappear on search over and over. The same unavailable ticket for 9pm Beach Volleyball on a Sunday became a meme amongst shoppers. It was always listed, and never available. For three straight days.
I was very blessed to have all the tickets I needed through work connections. I was unimpacted by the lacking functionality of the system.
But after hearing about it, I had to try it for myself. It was terrible. One of our employees, who works in ticketing and has since 2002, sold tickets on the re-sale site and lamented that it took him 45 minutes and he wasn't even sure it would work. Another industry veteran acquaintance is still waiting for a refund two weeks after the event he sold due to a technical issue.
I heard many on the Paris '24 side boasting about how well the re-sale site did to keep prices low and how many transactions it did. I'm sure both those things are true - but so is the fact that it sucked. Badly. And in 2024, in the days of billion dollar marketplace re-sellers, that's just inexcusable.
LA 2028
In four years, the global capital of ticketing, Los Angeles, will host the Summer Olympic Games.
California boasts Ticketmaster, AXS, Tickets.com, Tixr, StubHub, and Gametime as homegrown ticketing mega-firms who HQ in the state. We don't have ticketing perfected yet - but we're the best in the world at it - and by a lot.
AXS is part of the ticketing provider for LA '28 alongside Eventim, who was the provider for Paris ‘24. I have faith they'll deliver a far better experience.
My hope: They will adhere to the four tenets of ticketing and fans will have a far better experience than Paris - which was otherwise a sensational Games.
This is the most ridiculous article I’ve ever read. The Paris 2024 ticket was easy and you could get any ticket for any event you wanted. I got tickets to 26 events over my 11 days in Paris. To say they failed at their ticketing process is extremely laughable. Nice try.