Some fans may have waited hours in the rain to get into the College Football Playoff national title game in Atlanta because a visit from President Donald Trump that put security on high alert, but as far as Ticketmaster is concerned, the mobile ticketing went “amazingly well.”
In an interview with SportTechie after the game, Greg Economou, Ticketmaster North America’s Head of Sports and Chief Commercial Officer, said Monday night’s issues affected about 1 percent of mobile ticket users, or a few hundred people out of the 51,113 total mobile ticket entries.
Many of the impacted fans faced a glitch in the CFP app (an updated iOS version correcting a problem with adding tickets was offered two days before the game) or lost battery on their mobile devices and had to go to the box office to receive an SMS version of their ticket or hard stock. According to Ticketmaster, “a small number of fans experienced minor entry delays due to tickets purchased from unofficial sources, which Ticketmaster resolved before kickoff.”
Several fans complained to reporters that the entry process was among the worst they’d seen, including Mindy Eskew, a Georgia fan who told ESPN that some fans had difficulty pulling up their mobile tickets due to connectivity issues.
“It’s the worst experience of going to a game I’ve ever been to,” she said.
But Economou chalked up the CFP game, which marked Ticketmaster’s first major championship sporting event that required most fans to use mobile tickets instead of paper ones, as a win because of the sheer volume of people who checked it with mobile tickets and a sharp reduction in fraud.
According to Ticketmaster, roughly 72 percent of all tickets scanned for the game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which has a capacity of roughly 75,000, were mobile. Most of the 17,000 paper tickets used were given out by the teams, league or to VIPs, as fraudulent tickets went from thousands in a typical game to just a handful.
“From our perspective it worked amazingly well,” Economou said. “The weather was a factor, certainly the Secret Service was a factor in getting people into the building, but the people who actually experienced issues with their tickets was a minor number in the grand scheme of things.”
The CFP declined comment.
Thank you for your patience entering the stadium. Gate 1 has resumed full operation. pic.twitter.com/3mBuMCUCkZ
— College Football Playoff (@CFBPlayoff) January 9, 2018
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Ticketmaster views mobile ticketing as the inevitable future of game-day entries. While it may take time to get fans comfortable with the idea of relying on their phones and an app to enter games, Economou believes the live events industry will move to mobile the way airline tickets have in recent years.
He cites speed, efficiency and the ability to do digital transfers among the benefits of mobile ticketing for fans, while teams and organizations benefit from a lack of fraud and access to information about ticket holders, which enables them to market more effectively in the future by targeting specific fans.
“This was a glimpse into the future and I think it’ll become the normal course of business over time for fans,” Economou said.
Ticketmaster began rolling out mobile ticketing with a handful of NFL clients this past season through its new digital ticketing platform Presence. The authentication technology leverages a “tap and go” entry method using proximity-based sensors, such as NFC chips (the same technology that powers Apple Pay).
The NFL is working to install Presence at every stadium as it launches league-wide mobile ticketing with the 2018 preseason. Economou said Ticketmaster is beginning to expand the service to other leagues and sports as well.