How many tickets have you bought in your life? Five? Ten? Dozens? Hundreds? Everybody’s bought tickets. And no matter where they were purchased, what kind of event they were purchased for, or which ticket-purchasing platform was used, it’s more likely than not that most of those purchases were unpleasant experiences.
The ticket buying process has been so bad and so frustrating for so long that we’ve simply grown accustomed to it. Hidden fees? Of course there are! Tickets that seem available but suddenly aren’t? That’s just how it works. Reseller sites like StubHub that instantly offer inflated prices? Well, everyone knows the system’s rigged, right?
The entire ticketing process is an unethical mess. But what can we do about it? One frustrated consumer asked just that question, and Ticketpass is his answer.
“The ticketing industry is dirty and broken,” said Ticketpass CEO and Founder, Rodrigo Bautista. “The big ticketing companies don’t really care about people. They’re money driven, they do what they want, and charge what they want. I had to do something.”
Ethical Ticketing
Rodrigo Bautista was born in Mexico City, where he was a nationally competitive soccer player and swimmer. After graduating from university, he quickly got a marketing job at Adidas, which he then parlayed into graduate school in London. In London, he was burned on a ticket purchase when his partner fell ill and had to back out of an event at the last minute. Unable to refund her ticket and stuck with a loss, he decided to do something about it. After working in a nightclub for nearly a year to educate himself on the event and ticketing industry, he founded Ticketpass.
There are two things that set Ticketpass apart from the rest of the ticketing industry. First, the self-serve, online platform has as simple, transparent pricing structure. If you’re an event organizer, and you set up your event on Ticketpass, Ticketpass will add 10% on top of the value you set for your event’s tickets (with a cap of £5 per ticket, and no fee for free tickets).
Charitable Giving
On top of that, 50% of the fees collected by Ticketpass are donated to a charity of either the event organizer or ticket purchaser’s choice. The platform is financially transparent to both event organizers and ticket purchasers and allows the event and its attendees to do a little (or a lot of) good in the world.
Ticketpass is, of course, just getting started. But they have already landed some strong customers – global insurance broker Hays has ticketed events through them, as has Conifa, the second biggest soccer association in the world. Ticketpass has also partnered with GlobalGiving, allowing Ticketpass to reach more than four thousand live and vetted charity projects in more than 170 countries.
LOT Network
Ticketpass joined LOT Network because they sensed a kindred spirit there. Explaining that, like LOT Network, the core value behind Ticketpass is to do the right thing and eliminate bad industry practices, Bautista added, “I joined LOT Network because I felt it was the right thing to do.”