NO TICKET REQUIRED — The Veritix Blog

Remember the 2010 Men’s Final Four in April? It’s been a few months, but we’d like to share with you how Veritix^TM was involved in one of the most exciting sports events of the year:

• Flash Seats®, our paperless ticketing platform, was used exclusively for ticketing the student sections for the Final Four Division I championship games in Indianapolis.
• With our patented, secure, online paperless ticketing platform, the NCAA ensured that only designated students could enter and sit in the student sections.
• By using the built-in features of Flash Seats, the NCAA set up Final Four tickets so they could not be transferred or sold, which virtually eliminated the possibility of ticket misuse and fraud.
• The NCAA needed a ticketing platform and a company that could provide a high-quality performance without problems, and Flash Seats was able to deliver the ultimate in convenience, service and experience.

Coming off the success of the Final Four, we’re excited to build on our relationship with the NCAA. Veritix will now be handling the ticketing application process for several championship games, including the Men’s and Women’s Final Four, and will be the exclusive ticketing provider for advanced ticket sales for all NCAA championship games. The NCAA will also continue using Flash Seats as the ticketing platform for the Men’s Final Four student sections. For more information on our expanded relationship with the NCAA, view our joint press release.

We are thrilled to have this opportunity to work more extensively with the NCAA and look forward to continuing our successful partnership for many years!

On Father’s Day, my dad and I spent the day at a ballgame, a tradition since I was a child. Some of my greatest memories were spent with my hero at the ballpark. This week, as I sat with my dad and my own kids, who have now joined in the tradition, I reflected on the times my dad arranged this day during all the years I was growing up, and the lessons I learned from him.

When I was a kid, my dad left work early—even sneaking away sometimes—to go to the stadium and buy tickets for Father’s Day. He made a point to get there early in the week to make sure we had good seats. Dad used these outings to teach me about “little white lies.”

A few times, the game was sold out, so we had to find someone selling tickets outside the stadium on game day. I remember feeling nervous, as my dad rushed, spoke in hushed tones and turned a suspicious eye to the person we were “doing business with.” Dad used these moments to teach me words like “scalper” and “misdemeanor.”

Most times the tickets were fine, but one year the tickets weren’t real. So we spent Father’s Day at home listening to the game on the radio. Dad used that day to teach me the word “fraudulent.”

Another time, we couldn’t get tickets at all, from anyone. The game was sold out. As we listened to the radio again, my dad taught me about “the laws of supply and demand.”

Then, I started buying the tickets by calling the box office over the phone. Our ritual changed a bit because we had to get to the stadium early to stand in line at Will Call. The virtue of “patience,” which my dad often preached, was something I needed.

One year, work was busy, and I didn’t try to buy tickets until late in the week. The game was sold out, so I had to use the 21^st century advancement of “ticket brokers” online. I got the tickets, but we had to meet our broker at an off-site office. This is the year my father’s lessons of “the early bird” and “failure to plan is planning to fail” rang true.

Now that I work in the ticketing industry with our Flash Seats® product, I marvel at how easy it is for anyone to buy tickets to a ballgame. No more planning to get to the game early to buy or pick up tickets, no need to deal with off-site pickups, no paper tickets at all!

My father’s reaction to no paper tickets was priceless—he was amazed. We handed over my credit card, and our seat locator printed out of the handheld unit. Maybe what I should have paid attention to was my own kids’ reaction—NO reaction at all. I wonder how I can teach them the same things my dad did at all the ballgames we attended.

Technology like Flash Seats is changing not just our ticket experience but our lives too. So take your kids and your dad to a game today…don’t wait until next year’s Father’s Day.

The much-hyped debut of Washington Nationals rookie pitcher Stephen Strasburg came and went, and the hard-throwing righty didn’t disappoint. In seven innings, he struck out 14 and gave up just two runs, locking up his first major league victory.

As a ticketing company, one number in the box score stood out to us: 40,300. That’s how many people showed up on a Tuesday night to watch the rookie’s much anticipated debut. The last time the Nationals played at home on a Tuesday, just 17,000 fans made their way through the gates. As the summer goes on, the Nationals are sure to drive big crowds anytime Strasburg pitches, regardless of what city they are in, as baseball fans try to catch a glimpse of this summer’s hottest baseball attraction.

Basic economics tells us that when supply is low and demand is high, prices should rise. Not in today’s ticketing environment. Teams set a price for a specific seat and continue selling tickets at that price throughout the season. The Strasburg phenomenon is a prime example of the role dynamic pricing can play in sports and live events. Certain athletes, acts, championships and other events will be more of an attraction for fans, making them willing to pay more for a ticket. Dynamic pricing enables this by providing teams and venues with flexibility in pricing each event they offer.

Dynamic pricing operates by using an algorithm to determine a price for a specific event based on a number of factors. Determining the correct algorithm for ticket pricing is key. As Veritix^TM CEO Samuel Gerace said in a recent Sports Business Journal article, “Everybody’s experimenting to understand the science and figure out the algorithms, as nobody wants to damage their pricing models with haphazard processes.” Veritix is working to enhance and expand the technology, including gathering and parsing historical data, behind dynamic pricing, and we believe we can arm teams with valuable information to determine the best pricing for a given event.

For our clients who use our Flash Seats® ticketing platform, which combines paperless ticketing with a client-branded secondary market, we already see dynamic pricing as the model driving the pricing for seats in our secondary marketplaces. The Flash Seats marketplace is the epitome of dynamic pricing.  Fans can see in real time what people are asking for tickets, what people are willing to spend on tickets and in the end, what price the tickets sold for. Real-time prices that people are willing to pay are the norm on our secondary marketplaces, similar to how dynamic pricing can work on the primary ticketing side too.

Although fans sometimes have concerns about dynamic pricing and the effect it will have on prices, we believe it’s really in the best interest of fans. Fans have shown time and time again that they are willing to pay higher prices for certain events on our Flash Seats platform and unwilling to pay certain prices for less desirable events too. Dynamic pricing takes all of that into account, ensuring fans are getting a price in line with the real value of a ticket. At Veritix, we think dynamic pricing will ultimately be the future of the ticket pricing model, and we will continue to refine and expand our technology to give the best value to fans and clients alike.

Recently, The Globe and Mail in British Columbia reported a scam involving tickets to Olympic events during the Vancouver Winter Olympics earlier this year. Several hundred sellers sold event tickets to a group of criminals on the Olympics fan-to-fan tickets site, run by the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC).

The criminals used fake credit cards to purchase tickets and made off with nearly $2 million. The tickets they purchased on the secondary market site were legitimate, and they purchased them during high-traffic times, when fans were trying to buy tickets to popular events, which made it difficult to detect the fraudulent activity immediately. Because they purchased the tickets with fake credit cards, the sellers never received their money. The fraud was detected quickly, and VANOC is reimbursing sellers for the money they lost.

As a ticketing company with our own secondary market platform—Flash Seats®—we commend VANOC for acting quickly to shut down the scam. Fraud is always a concern in the ticketing business, as this story illustrates, and that’s why we’ve gone to such great lengths to make our system secure for the fans that buy and sell tickets on our secondary market.

Our Flash Seats technology allows our clients to customize a client-branded, secure secondary marketplace where their fans can buy, sell and transfer paperless tickets. The technology used for our Flash Seats platform significantly reduces the opportunity for fraud:

• It’s a closed loop system, which means our clients’ paperless tickets originate in Flash Seats and can only be bought and sold on the client’s branded, secure marketplace.
• Every paperless ticket is tied to a unique electronic ID, such as a credit card or driver’s license. Because of this, paperless tickets can easily and safely be transferred or sold in our marketplaces. People who receive a ticket in a sale or transfer are required to register their own electronic ID in order to use the ticket. The unique electronic ID is the method by which paperless ticket holders enter an event.
• All Flash Seats client marketplaces are secure and password-protected and use the latest encryption technology to keep customer data private.
• The only tickets that can be sold on our secondary market are our clients’ paperless Flash Seats tickets. No tickets from outside sources can be sold on our marketplace.
• When a sale occurs, the tickets are transferred directly into the buyer’s account, and the payment is deposited directly into the seller’s account, all of which is facilitated in our secure system.
• When tickets are purchased on our secondary market, the credit card used for purchase is what gets the buyer into an event. There are no paper tickets, and each ticket on our system is tied to a unique electronic ID, such as a credit card.
• We monitor transactions closely, so that we can quickly identify and deal with any fraud that may occur.

While the potential for fraud will always exist, we believe we have the most secure, robust and fan-friendly secondary market available. As we grow and serve more and more fans with our Flash Seats paperless platform, we will continue to innovate and use the latest technology to ensure that our system is as secure as possible, letting fans worry about the things that really matter to them—how many points their favorite player will score or what songs their favorite band will play—and not whether or not they’ve been scammed.