Flying tickets for the 2nd Red Bull Flugtag
June 2008
ts.com are providing “Flying Tickets” on Saturday 7th June, as they have been chosen as the ticketing partner for the 2nd Red Bull Flugtag in London. The Red Bull Flugtag will see up to 80,000 people gather in Hyde Park to watch 41 crazy man-powered flying machines soar off a 6m high ramp into the Serpentine. All of those 80,000 have received a print-at-home ticket sent through ts.com’s ticketing solution ts Web.
Entry to the event is free. But for safety and crowd control purposes in Hyde Park the organisers of the Flugtag, Red Bull, needed to ticket the event. They ran a registration scheme on their own website, and because they expected more requests for tickets than there were actually tickets, they ran a ballot to fairly allocate them. A lucky 80,000 were chosen by Red Bull, and batch files of data of successful applicants were passed to ts.com to manage the distribution of print-at-home tickets through ts Web to the email address of the lucky recipients.
The ticket holder simply opened the email and clicked on the link to their tickets which have been fully Red Bull branded for the event. They will then print the tickets out, and bring them along to the appropriate entry gate specified on the ticket. Each print-at-home ticket contains a unique bar code which will be scanned as the ticket holder walks into the Flugtag event area, validating the ticket and allowing entry. ts.com have provided the organisers of the Flugtag with live and back up servers which will be linked via armoured co-axial cable to each of the four site gates to enable the tickets to be scanned and validated in real time. This will also help with crowd control by enabling the organisers to keeping track of the number of people entering the site.
Mark Ellis Managing Director of ts.com commented “We are honoured to have been selected to run the ticket distribution for the 2nd Red Bull Flugtag and have worked closely with the organisers over the past few weeks to implement the solution. To ensure that all goes smoothly on the day, we have studied anticipated profiles of crowd flow through the gates to ensure that the remote servers are able to handle the expected volume, and have provided an additional server as back up. Print-at-home tickets and scanning at the gate are a great solution to make sure your large-scale free event stays safe and a great experience for all.”
Nichola Spencer from Red Bull was responsible for ticketing the event. “We needed a solution we could rely on to keep track of the crowd numbers entering the site, and ts.com has given us the flexibility to do this using the bar coded tickets and hand held scanners at the gates. It has also helped to cut out the cost and administration involved in producing pre-printed paper tickets, but allowed us to stay in full control of our brand at every customer touch point. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone turn up at the event pass smoothly through the gates and with help from the great team at ts.com, enjoy a great Flugtag!”