Introduction

The objective of the system is to facilitate ease of ticketing management thus making the process effective and efficient, at the same time blurring geographical boundaries to buy tickets from specified outlets only. While giving a loyal customer base to the Service Provider, the system will reduce ticket procuring pain, time, and certainty of the public in this busy world.

Business Problems

Selling tickets for various sports and cultural events have been a difficult task for the event organizers. The tickets should be available at a convenient location to the buyer. In a paper ticket based system, there were limitation of number of locations where you can sell the tickets. Secondly, the difficulty in predicting the ratio in which tickets should be divided among the selling locations in order to optimize sale of tickets was a mind boggling task. Internet and online ticketing has changed the scenario but still the unavailability of internet to every interested ticket buyer has been a bottleneck with internet based online ticketing.

The Solution

BrickRed implemented a magnetic stripe based online solution where in tickets are sold through various merchant locations in form of magnetic stripe based plastic cards. Two kinds of cards were proposed in the system:

Privileged member cards: These are the personalized (Printed with name, signature and photographs) member cards given to the people who are regular visitors to sports or cultural events being held in the particular geographical area. They hold the card permanently and use them for various events. As privileged customers, they get discounts and priority while booking the tickets for various events. Multiple tickets for single or multiple events can be associated with same card. Currently, users have to take there card to general merchants spread throughout the city, select a seat from the chart, pay for the ticket and get the ticket loaded on there card. Merchants either carry a POS terminal or a PC to connect to the online host and book the tickets.

Temporary event cards: These are the temporary cards available with the merchants for once in a while customers who don't want to carry a permanent card with them. The ticket buying procedure for them remains the same but with a difference that the card is taken back at the event venue.

These cards are checked at the venue using POS terminals or PC's. These PC's or POS are either connected online to the central host or the ticket data gets downloaded on the POS/PC and checked locally. A physical token (printed receipt) is also issued to the customer to keep with them during the course of the event.

Benefits

There are multitude benefits given by this system.

Ease of ticket procurement for customers as they can procure tickets from multiple vendors. This result in increased revenues as people tends to buy tickets if they can buy if from any where, even from the grocery merchants.

A club of privileged members is formed. They get discounts & priority while booking there tickets. This result in general satisfaction for the members and increased revenue for the event organizer as the number of viewers increase due to formation of privileged clubs.

Problem of dividing the tickets among various selling location is completely removed. A customer can procure ticket from any merchant without thinking that the other merchant might have better seats left with him or if the ticket is not available at this location, then rush to other locations to buy tickets from there.

Authenticity of Ticket - Unlike paper tickets that are easy to reproduce, if not very expensively designed, magnetic strip based membership card / e-Tickets are guaranteed authentic.

Easy recovery of lost tickets - if card is lost, members can get their existing card cancelled and can get a new card issued, with all existing tickets on lost card loaded on new card, by paying a nominal fees.
Saving on the printing of tickets for every event as the same cards can be used again and again.

Future Prospects

There are lots of things that can be done in future with this application. Currently we are working on providing a web interface to this application so that the privileged members can get the ticket loaded on there cards sitting from there home. We are also working on providing tickets in form of Barcodes for people who want to buy tickets through internet and not visit any merchant at all..

Technologies used

Card Operating System: Hi-Co Magnetic Strip Cards
Terminal: Schlumberger Magic Series Terminals
IDE: Visual c++ for host implementation
RDBMS: Oracle 8i