Case Study: The Edinburgh Festival Fringe

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the largest arts festival in the world with sales reaching some 1.7m tickets for a three and a half week period in August every year.

The Fringe is made up of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society and independant performers, venues and producers.  The Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society is a registered charity established with the objectives of publishing a comprehensive programme of all Festival Fringe events, to sell tickets centrally and to offer advice and support to performers.

The golden rule of the Fringe is that anybody can take part. There is no control over artistic content, making the Edinburgh Fringe one of the most diverse festivals with performers ranging from amatuers and school groups to internationaly reknowned artists and companies. Venues sizes range from 1 ticket (one show was performed in a cardboard box) to the Edinburgh Playhouse, the largest theatre in the UK with over 3,000 seats. Venue ticket sales range from thousands of tickets to hundreds of thousands of tickets.

The real complexity is in the ownership of ticket inventory and the requirement for many organisations in 247 venues spread across the city to operate independently whilst also interacting with the Fringe Society and each other. Each venue owns its inventory, giving a percentage to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society to sell. Some venues set up their own web, counter and phone ticketing operations to run in parallel with the Fringe Society operation and others only set up their own box office when they arrive in Edinburgh at the end of July.

The Fringe Society sells tickets for all shows in the programme and can sell up to 50% of a venue's transactions. Several venues cross sell for each other.

Previously, the Fringe used a centralised system, based at the Festival Fringe office, with the option for venues to connect in remotely, creating a Fringe network of sales outlets. This setup worked well for the sharing of data, but was technically out of the reach of smaller venues. Every venue that used the system was reliant on communication with the Fringe Society hub. If the connection to the hub went down through a comms or hardware fault or failure, the venue would loose all box office functionality. Loosing your box office when you have shows going in every few minutes is a major problem.

Red61 was founded in 2002 with the purpose of building a ticketing system that could handle the size and complexity of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and yet be simple to operate and easy to distribute. With six years experience as a distributor of the Fringe's previous ticketing system, the principals of Red61 realised that the next generation of Fringe ticketing system would need to offer a range of solutions to a highly complex and intense sales operation.

The result was the VIA ticketing system. It's unique architecture allows venues to retain ultimate control of their own inventory whilst at the same time allowing other VIA users direct access to that inventory. Multiple sales networks can be created and venues can join or leave a sales network as required. Customers can purchase and collect tickets at any point on a sales network.

Sales outlets generally have 2 or 3 communications channels and there is no single point of failure, making it impossible for the whole network to go down.

The city-wide network is managed by network gateway management devices called Redgates, designed and built by Red61. These units are used to connect the Festival Fringe office, other venues and a venue's satellite box offices. These units provide auto fail over to alternate communication links, real time reporting on network status and prioritise the flow of ticketing data. These units also provide vital firewall capabilities to help meet the strict requirements of PCI:DSS.

The VIA client is bundled with the server and delivered automatically to the workstation either across the local network or online. Client upgrades are automatically installed at log on. Automated delivery significantly reduces the maintenance and support overhead.

VIA is a ticketing system with full functionality featuring multi level access for managers, supervisors and sales staff. Access to inventory and functionality is strictly controlled at every level across multiple servers and venues.

VIA has the capacity to manage high volume sales campaigns, but is flexible enough to suit smaller capacity venues with a variety of installation options including in-house and hosted services.

The VIA sales process is intuitive and logical. Training is minimal, sales are fast and records are easy to access. This is essential in the Fringe environment where staff are temporary and need to pick up the process and find information very quickly.

• 872,484 tickets processed
• £7.6m worth of sales
• 1,037 events
• 17,813 performances
• 79 venues
• 23 sales sites
• 5 web sites
• 10 Sales organisations
• 9 inventory servers
• 2 sales servers

The robust structure of VIA's networking and ease of delivery and use allowed Red61 to step int the last minute to help solve some ticketing problems in 2008, increasing the network from 9 sites to 23 sites in 10 days.

Red61 has won the contract to supply the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society ticketing system and manage it's ticketing operation from 2009 onwards and sales through VIA are expected to reach 1.2m tickets.