Twickets, the fan-to-fan ticket resale platform, has opened for business in Australia, its first presence outside the U.K.
The Australian operation, which enables registered users to buy and sell tickets at face value (or less), is based in Melbourne and helmed by Danny Hannaford, former Head of Ticketing at U.K. promoter Global Live.
To coincide with the launch, Twickets has partnered with Ed Sheeran on the British singer and songwriter’s 2018 stadium tour of these parts, which has expanded to 18 dates across Australia and New Zealand, besting the record of 14 stadium shows set by AC/DC in 2010.
Sheeran partners with Twickets in the U.K. and that relationship follows through to his Australasian tour promoter, Michael Gudinski’s Frontier Touring Company, which will work closely with the new arrival by pointing gig-goers directly to the resale platform for sold-out shows.
Earlier this week, Frontier Touring and Sheeran gave Twickets a plug on social media by directing fans to a bespoke landing page where they can sign up for email alerts when tickets for his sold-out dates become available.
Frontier + @edsheeran have teamed up with @Twickets to allow ticketholders to sell spare tix at original face value: https://t.co/lUQ8o6mmca pic.twitter.com/JCuHiHpBTc
— Frontier Touring (@frontiertouring) May 24, 2017
Also, Twickets has partnered with Handsome Tours on the upcoming Australian tour for U.K.-chart-topping grime star Stormzy, who performed with Sheeran at the 2017 Brit Awards, and for tours starring British bluesman Rag’n’Bone Man, Icelandic post-rocker Sigur Rós, U.S. producer DJ Shadow and folk singer Laura Marling.
The Aussie service launched at Twickets.com.au with an app for iOS and Android due to follow in the coming weeks.
Twickets arrives in a marketplace fed-up with tickets to hot shows appearing on secondary platforms for ludicrous sums. “We started to notice more and more news articles coming through (on scalping),” Hannaford tells Billboard. “We got very excited with the idea that we could come and help out. The puzzle pieces came together and it all just fell into place. We were quite happy to have that last piece.”
Founded by digital entrepreneur Richard Davies, Twickets has become the official resale partner for some of the U.K.’s biggest artists, including Adele, One Direction and The 1975, and a slew of festivals. Since its arrival there in February 2015, more than 500,000 Brits have downloaded Twickets’ app, registered on site or followed on social media.
The face-value ticket resale service drives revenue through a 10 percent booking fee on buyers, and is set to roll out in the U.S. and continental Europe during 2017.