OnLine Ticketing

[Karl Fields]

Lots of companies out there offering this, some good, some not, some unknown, but here is something to help with your decision making:

Interactive Ticketing will soon be sharing online haunt sales information with the HHA club. Are you kidding me? Talk about shooting themselves in the foot.


Damn all these letter groups - meant that to be HAA

[monsterwax]

I can't believe the fees they expect from each ticket. It's 10 to 20% of the ticket price for a computer transaction. We don't have that kind of gravy to throw out to the dogs.

[Karl Fields]

Fees are a different animal.
I just can't believe that they would sent their haunt client's sales history to others.
Nor can I believe that their is no interest in this thread

[Haunted Prints (EOM)]

Thats weird. You think there would be some way to protect against that or make it illegal for them to do.

I say just dont use them. Who knows what other information they might sell/use.

[MovieRelics]

Hey Karl,

Do you have a link to where you found that they said they will be providing haunter data to third parties? I agree with you that's kind of shady and I'd like to do some follow up for that and if it's as bad as it sounds, post a thing on HauntersDigest about it. I just need to see where they are saying that.

[Karl Fields]

Is that doubting Thomas I see

Patrick Konopelski
HHA President
and I quote
"Did you ever wonder how your year compared to others around the country? Yes, we can ask each other at the bar during the conventions, but you simply don't know if the information is accurate or if it's the vodka talking.

Why is this important? Well, if we know how well all of us are doing we can use this information to determine the effectiveness of our marketing compared to the state of the industry. The problem is trusting someone with that information. The solution is to work with a group that we already trust with our data. It needs to be a company that we already have a relationship with and understands our industry.

We have begun discussions with Interactive Ticketing. They have agreed to put together a program that would allow members of our association to opt in to an information sharing group."

Hey Karl,

Do you have a link to where you found that they said they will be providing haunter data to third parties? I agree with you that's kind of shady and I'd like to do some follow up for that and if it's as bad as it sounds, post a thing on HauntersDigest about it. I just need to see where they are saying that.

[MovieRelics]

Hey Karl,

I didnt mean for you to think that I was doubting you. I just need to know where it's printed so if I contact him for clarification or reference it for an article, I can have it to reference and include it in the article. If you can provide a link to the original article or website, that would be great. A few people have already contacted me with more info about this to, so I'm going to be following up on this topic for HauntersDigest.

[Karl Fields]

There own little newsletter called ScreamZone. Vol 18 dated 10.26.11 My spam filter caught it
Why do I even receive these???

Hey Karl,

I didnt mean for you to think that I was doubting you. I just need to know where it's printed so if I contact him for clarification or reference it for an article, I can have it to reference and include it in the article. If you can provide a link to the original article or website, that would be great. A few people have already contacted me with more info about this to, so I'm going to be following up on this topic for HauntersDigest.

[thebatesmotel]

Online tickets and Interactive Ticketing

I have investigated these allegations and they are completely unfounded. Karl Fields uses another ticketing company and is not aware of conversations between IT and HAA. The Haunted Attraction Association has asked for a broad sense of ticketing trends in order to help the haunted attraction community. Interactive would never give out customer information; that would be in violation of their contracts with all attractions that they represent. I have worked with Dave and Terry at IT and they are some of the most respected vendors in the industry. If anyone is in need of online ticket service, this is the company to use. Their fees are the lowest in the online ticket industry, and their support staff, available 24 hours a day is exemplory. Any high fees that you see are set by the attractions themselves.

[Karl Fields]

Randy,
Allegations? What the heck are you talking about?- I am not sure what you are investigating - I am just quoting from the HAA newsletter. Is the information that was printed wrong? Did Patrick misspeak? Does anyone proof the newsletters? Not being a member why do I even receive them?

Hope you have a great weekend!
Karl

I have investigated these allegations and they are completely unfounded. Karl Fields uses another ticketing company and is not aware of conversations between IT and HAA. The Haunted Attraction Association has asked for a broad sense of ticketing trends in order to help the haunted attraction community. Interactive would never give out customer information; that would be in violation of their contracts with all attractions that they represent. I have worked with Dave and Terry at IT and they are some of the most respected vendors in the industry. If anyone is in need of online ticket service, this is the company to use. Their fees are the lowest in the online ticket industry, and their support staff, available 24 hours a day is exemplory. Any high fees that you see are set by the attractions themselves.

[thebatesmotel]

Karl,

Your allegation is that Interactive Ticketing will be giving out everyone's online ticket sales stats. Thats not true. IT was asked by HAA to provide broad trends in online sales, not individual stats. I spoke directly with HAA and IT on this matter and both stated emphatically that there will never be any release of individual sales statistics for attractions. The issue at hand is that IT was asked to provide information about online ticket sales trends, meaning, are more people buying online, are haunted attractions increasing their marketing of online sales, is that marketing program working, etc. I don't see this as a violation of any contracts, and it will be useful information for attractions looking to get into an online ticket sales system, and choosing the right ticketing vendor.
I don't know why you recieve the newsletter; probably you were a member at one time and opted in to get these updates. I'm sure there is an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email that would allow you to cancel your subscription.

I hope you are able to understand this. If not, give me a call and I'll try to explain it to you in more detail.

[monsterwax]

Watching this thread from the sidelines, I was hoping they were not providing specific company information to others, and I'm glad to hear they are not. But it was mentioned that this company offers the lowest fees in tickets. Can you tell us what that is? (There website doesn't say, or if it does, doesn't make the info easy to find). It seems the going rate is 10 - 20%, which seems rather high to have a computer run an automatic program and credit card transaction. I suspect that most the people here work a lot harder to earn 10 -20% of each ticket working on their haunts. I'd love to find an online ticket place that provides service for 5%. Please provide us some details if you can.

[thebatesmotel]

Contact Terry at http://www.interactiveticketing.com/ . He can give you all the info. We pay about 2% of our ticket price ($40.00), however we sell a lot of tickets online. If you need more info, contact me at info[MENTION=12686]thebatesmotel[/MENTION].com

[BrettBertolino]

It's rare that I post on any forum, but I do feel so strongly about this issue I wanted to echo Randy Bates' comments about Interactive Ticketing.

As a new client of Interactive Ticketing I cannot say enough great things about the service, product and price provided by Interactive. We had been using another ticketing company for the past 15 years. After doing extensive research last year, both inside and outside the industry, we signed a long term agreement with Interactive to provide both an online and on-site POS solution for Terror Behind the Walls. Our season is not yet over, but I can tell you our guests and our staff is much happier with the new ticketing system. It is not only more user friendly, but it also is a lot more customizable than many of the other solutions on the market. In addition, our customers are paying lower fees, yet we are making more money from those fees - it's a win, win situation. Just last week, we announced that we will be using Interactive Ticketing to provide an online and on-site ticketing solution year-round for our daytime prison tour program. As you can see, we're obviously very happy with Interactive.

As a board member of the HAA, I can tell you we would never ask any vendor to share the confidential data of their clients. We noticed, as you may have noticed, that Interactive Ticketing has a very long list of haunted attraction clients, including some of the biggest names in the industry. In fact, they may be the single largest independent online seller of haunted house tickets. A lot of times we make guesses about facts about our industry. It is rare that we have the concrete data that would be genuinely useful in growing our businesses. For example, the percentage of our online sales has increased every year for the past five years. That's good. However, we have nothing to bench mark these increases against. We might be feeling good that our online sales are increasing by 5% every year, but if we found out that average inclrease for haunts nationwide was 10% I am sure we wouldn't be as happy with our 5% increase. Of course these numbers are just made up because we have no real data for haunts nationwide. It seems that Interactive could provide the industry it servers with date that would be helpful in growing both their business and ours.

I look forward to seeing everyone at the Legendary Haunt Tour this November 10-12 in Philadelphia. You can purchase your tickets now through Interactive Ticketing at: http://legendaryhaunttour.com/lht-buy-tickets

Brett Bertolino
Director of Operations
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, Inc.

PS This a message from Interactive Ticketing. If you still have questions, I would encourage you to contact them directly.

“Interactive Ticketing does NOT share Client data with anyone. We have made a name for ourselves in the haunt industry as being a company with integrity and trust. We are open about our pricing and treat every haunt the same, regardless of their size. We charge $0.75 per ticket (with a 3,500 ticket minimum) for our Premier Solution and charge $0.99 for our do-it-yourself solution available at www.squareonetickets.com.


If anyone has any questions regarding our service they can contact our President, David Arevalo or myself anytime at 877-253-5676.”


-Terry Howisey
Vice President
Interactive Ticketing

[Karl Fields]

Brent and Randy - Don't shoot the messenger cause I have no horse in this race! We don't use Interactive. I had only posted the tidbit item because it came over from the HAA and people were talking about what makes a good ticketing solution, options to watch for etc.

I'm really glad that Interactive is not planning on doing this, but on the other hand I am curious why HAA would publish something that far off base.
Karl