No Refund Policy? No Problem. Introducing Ticket Resale with accesso ShoWare!

It’s the day of the big championship game at your ice hockey arena, or perhaps it’s hours before your theatre opens the house for your sold-out matinee. One of your biggest sponsors wants to return some tickets. Maybe it’s an executive who purchased your best luxury suite, or it’s the donor who made a $5,000 contribution to your Education fund. She swings by the box office to make what she expects will be an easy return. Your new ticketing associate, not knowing the identity of this patron, replies with a cheery but firm, “Sorry, no refunds or exchanges,” leaving this important sponsor with a few options: give them away, sell them to someone personally or try their luck on one of the many secondary ticket reseller markets online. The donor begrudgingly walks away, questioning their continued participation with your organization. But what if we told you there was a way to avoid all of this?

The new Ticket Resale feature in our accesso ShoWare solution gives your patrons a trusted, secure and easy way to resell tickets in-house and completely under your control. This functionality allows you to avoid empty seats at performances, provide a creative alternative to “no refund/exchange” policies and to increase revenues. Furthermore, when a ticket is resold, your venue will receive patron data from the resale – something that you won’t receive from tickets sold on secondary markets.

By promoting this feature to your patrons, you are helping them avoid the risky (and usually costly) secondary ticket market. As many venues know, some reseller sites resort to unscrupulous tactics to sell tickets at grossly inflated prices. Many invest in paid search campaigns or SEO to make their link appear first when a customer searches on Google for tickets to your theatre. These resellers sometimes make claims that they are “official” and use similar colors and branding to convince unsuspecting patrons that they’ve found the primary ticketing page for a venue. How frustrating it is for a patron to realize they were duped! In a 2017 global consumer study of the ticket resale market, researchers found that 68% of consumers who purchased from a reseller did not realize they were such, and 75% of consumers paid more than the face value of the ticket. Furthermore, the average increase in ticket cost was nearly half of the ticket price.

With our Ticket Resale feature, unwanted tickets can only be put up for sale at face value, protecting the integrity of the transaction and protecting your valued patrons from scalpers. To another patron browsing, the ticket will not look any different from a regular ticket. When a patron decides to put their ticket up for sale, they will receive automated email notifications that provide updates on the item and when it has sold. Patrons can put tickets up for resale through their online account or at your box office, and they can reclaim their ticket at any time prior to the sale if they change their minds. When the ticket is sold, your venue retains any transaction fees (from both the original transaction and the resale), and the reselling patron will be automatically refunded. The initial barcode will be disabled and a new barcode generated, protecting your venue from fraud.

Our Ticket Resale feature provides venues with the flexibility to utilize this tool as needed. Clients can decide to use this on specific performances or even promote ticket resale as a special perk exclusive to members, season passholders, donors or series subscribers. This is a toggled feature for our clients, so contact your Client Services Manager or email [email protected] to get set up.

Watch our Learning Series video for more information. If you have questions or would like to learn more about our accesso ShoWare solution, contact us here or email [email protected].