KAABOO Festival-Goers Who Leave Early Will Be Able to Resell Their Tickets
Ticketing app FlipTix is teaming up with Southern California's KAABOO festival to allow attendees to buy and sell tickets throughout the event.
Ticketing app FlipTix is teaming up with Southern California’s KAABOO festival to allow attendees to buy and sell tickets throughout the event. The FlipTix platform gives people who leave the three-day festival early the chance to sell back their passes and recoup money, while others can swoop in to purchase discounted passes for the remainder of the event.
“With music festivals, one of the things that we’ve seen in the research that we’ve done is that nearly a third of all event attendees of any kind, music or sports, leave early before the end of an event. At music festivals it is a little higher than that,” FlipTix president Brian Siegel tells Billboard.
Ticket holders who exit prior to the end of an event simply press “I’m gone” in the FlipTix app, which notifies users outside the event that a ticket is available. The price of the new pass will be based on the amount of time left for the event. For example, if a fan releases a festival pass after one day of a three-day event, the new buyer will pay for roughly two days of the event instead of having to purchase a weekend pass.
Sellers will receive remuneration in the form of cash, credit, merchandise or gift cards. Buyers either pick up their activated wristband at a designated FlipTix location at the event venue or get a digital ticket delivered directly on their phone.
Siegel adds, “What we are trying to do for the KAABOO folks and ultimately for the music festival industry is to offer a legitimate, safe environment for consumers to be able to basically buy and sell their used wristbands.”
According to FlipTix research, there are 250,000 people currently subscribed to Reddit groups alone talking about unauthorized ticket resales.
“If you take a look at Reddit and Craigslist and others, there is this whole underground market of people that are selling their bands. They have figured out how to put the bands on so that they can slip them off,” Siegel says. “People are meeting people at parking lots or in less public places, giving folks cash for bands hoping that they work and often times they don’t, sometimes they do.”
Not only do venues and promoters leave money on the table with these behind-the-scenes transactions occurring, they are losing valuable data including who is in their venue.
In addition to security information, Siegel says “The data that we are providing is around time sensitivity: how long people stay at events, when they leave, when they come in.”
Through the use of FlipTix, Siegel explains that clients will learn valuable information on when to close concessions, what hours they need the most security and other information to run efficiently, economically and create the best experience for customers.
KAABOO Del Mar, which runs from Sept. 14-16 with headliners Foo Fighters, Imagine Dragons and Katy Perry, will be FlipTix first major festival partner, but the app has been utilized at BLK Live in Scottsdale, Arizona, since June. Depending on the need of each promoter, FlipTix has been able to provide a physical presence for awareness and ticket exchange, but can also deauthorize and reissue digital tickets remotely.
FlipTix will be stationed at all general admission entrances for KAABOO Del Mar and is celebrating its launch by introducing a promotional contest that will award the winner two Hang Loose three-day wristbands for the festival, a retail value of $558.00. Eligible participants must pre-register and create an account at www.fliptix.com/register and download the FlipTix mobile app with the link provided by end of day on Sept. 12.
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