New one-stop Edinburgh festival ticket portal put off at the last minute

Published on Thursday 5 August 2010 15:54

LONG-awaited plans to introduce a one-stop ticket outlet for Edinburgh's festivals have been shelved at the eleventh hour, The Scotsman can reveal.

The 700,000 project to create the first unified box office for all major events in the Capital was hoped to be rolled out this month after six years of planning and development.

The online ticket "portal", named Clicket, was supposed to allow festivals and venues to cross-sell, run joint packages and create special itineraries for ticket-buyers.

But it has been put on hold over concerns that it was not ready to handle tens of thousands of bookings for multiple events.

The delay is a major blow for Festivals Edinburgh, the umbrella body for flagship events such as the Fringe, the Tattoo and the Edinburgh International Festival. It launched its own joint website more than a year ago, but is unable to sell tickets on it.

The portal scheme was pursued to try and resolve the long-standing problem of audiences having to make multiple purchases to buy tickets for different events at different venues.

It was also aimed at tracking buying patterns for events, building up audience profiles and helping festivals fill more empty seats with "last-minute" ticket offers to subscribers.

The venture, funded by the Scottish Government, Scottish Arts Council and Edinburgh City Council, was backed by most of Edinburgh's leading festivals and arts venues, and was trailed at this year's Fringe launch.

It is hoped the website can be rolled out later this year, giving audiences the chance to buy tickets online for shows at venues such as the Traverse, Royal Lyceum and King's theatres, the Playhouse and the Queen's Hall.

A joint statement from Festivals Edinburgh and the Audience Business said: "The Edinburgh festivals have been long-time supporters of the city's drive to provide year-round, city-wide integrated ticketing and authoritative listings as part of the wider Edinburgh portal pilot project.

"It is a complex, ambitious project that requires thorough and independent testing. This testing will continue throughout the festivals in August 2010.

"Our priority with this innovation continues to be robust technical development and testing to ensure we are delivering a world-class service for future festival attendees."

Kate Park, project manager at the Audience Business, said: "This has been a long-term project which has undergone a lot of development over the years. The technology has just not existed until now to get this kind of system up and running before now.

"I don't think it's too disappointing that it's not ready for the festivals, but I hope it'll be up and running before the end of the year."

William Burdett-Coutts, artistic director at Assembly, one of the biggest Fringe promoters, said: "These kind of things always turn out to be a lot more complex than when you go into them. It's a great idea to try and set up a system where you can everything in the one place, but many of the venues already use the same joint box office system. It would make more sense to get more organisations using that."

Martin Reynolds, head of marketing at Festivals Edinburgh, said: "There was no fixed timetable for the roll-out of the new Clicket website and it'll only be launched when it is ready."