Ticketing System for High School

Hi All,
We just opened up our new 1100+ seat performance venue and are looking for a way to have an in-house ticketing system beyond just showing up the night of. We don't have a dedicated box office staff so we are looking for a system where patrons can choose seats at home, pay via card, and possibly printing tickets at home. What do you all use or recommend for our purposes? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I'm sure the people from Vendini or TicketLeap would love to talk to you. There are actually many vendors who have systems. The thing to watch for is how they handle getting their money. Most add a 'convenience fee' of $1.50 or so to your ticket price. TicketMaster does the same thing at grossly higher rates.

I have not used this but the fine people who brought us QLab have a ticketing program http://figure53.com/tixato/
We use Vendini, they have their pluses and minuses.

we use "in Ticketing" there is a fee for online purchase, but we also do box office sales, there is no fee to the customer for that...watch for setup, per ticket, and credit card fee's for whomever you decide to use....

Sean...

I just switched over to Tixato, from the makers of QLab, as mentioned above, and I love it. They dropped their prices recently to $.25 per ticket plus merchant fees if you setup a free Stripe account.

I use https://www.arts-people.com. (formerly Ticket turtle) They are pretty new, but have great customer support and is a very good system.

SHCP said:

I use https://www.arts-people.com. (formerly Ticket turtle) They are pretty new, but have great customer support and is a very good system.

Click to expand...

Seconded. I know a very large community theatre uses it and they seem happy with it.

I will second (third?) Tixato by Figure 53. Incredibly easy to set up. Amazing customer service. Accessible online from anywhere. Custom seating charts. Online purchasing. iPhone app for scanning tickets at the door. In my opinion — and no one's paying me to say this — there's really nothing else that comes close.

I will also put my vote towards Tixato by Figure 53. Though I have never used it, Qlab is so solid and well supported, I would expect nothing less from them with this product.

And also as they mentioned above, just watch all the fees. Some options put the fees towards the patrons and others put them towards the theater. Just be mindful of whatever you choose. Also, it isn't impossible to switch options if you have a few shows with problems.

For tixato, are their any additional fees associated with the stripe account, or are the fees they list on the home page really all there are?

For Tixato, the prices on their webpage, are accurate.

Cash sales are all free, which was very important for me so I didn't have to create a separate system for at-door ticket sales. Other vendors wanted to charge for cash sales since I was using their seating tracking system. For high schools, this is terrible given the number of students who buy tickets with cash.

Orders done online with credit cards, cost $.25 per ticket to Tixato and 2.9% and $.30 per transaction to Stripe for merchant processing. If you use Tixato as the merchant processor instead of Stripe, then I believe the Tixato price jumps significantly to $1 per ticket. I strongly recommend going with Stripe integration for Tixato - it was the smoothest interface I have encountered yet and the processing fee is comparable to most other vendors.

I love Tixato. Great prices, great customer support, and great overall experience. We are using another ticketing system at our theatre right now, and they charge a slew of fees, not to mention they only run on Windows and their entire system is SLOW. Tixato is fast, user-friendly for both patron and admin, and charges less fees. By a lot. The only downfall is as with everything with Figure 53, they are Apple only. That means that you can only check tickets with iOS devices or through a web browser. To be fair, it is a web interface, so it is platform-compatible in that way. Still, they are the best ticketing system I've seen in a long time.

Oh, and if anyone recommends TicketMaster, you run. You run so far. They're the worst. Both for patrons (what the HECK is this "convenience fee") and for administrators.

Good luck. If you use anything though, get an actual ticket printer. Cutting out tickets from full pages is the worst.

We use brown paper tickets and you get the option of either printing them or having them sent to you