Festival goers go mobile – Trinity Mobile provides mobile ticketing for UK festivals

Trinity Mobile is a definite player in the mobile ticketing arena, providing a combination of ticketing, coupons and marketing for transport, nightclubs and event organisers. Earlier this month it announced a major surge in airline mobile tickets – and today it reveals a push to get large festivals running their tickets through mobile.

What’s the story?

Trinity Mobile is already providing mobile tickets to nightclubs – clubbers buy their tickets through credit card or PayPal before the event, and the ticket is sent to their phone as a 2d barcode through either MMS or email. That way the customers don’t need to spend the money in their pocket on tickets at the door, and spend it at the bar instead.

The success of this service has been such (around 500,000 customers so far) that larger festivals are now being targetted. The big selling point that Trinity is using for this one is fraud and security – paper ticket fraud is always a problem at these events. WestFest is a massive dance festival in the west of England, which clocked up over 10,000 attendees last year. James Orfeur, the event manager, claims that there were zero bogus tickets through the Trinity Mobile system at the event: “What used to be the worst part of setting up the event became the easiest and most stress-free element of the show. Thanks to Trinity Mobile’s technology, I didn’t have to spend all my time dealing with paper ticketing issues and eliminated all of our problems with fraudulent tickets.”

What we think?

This falls under the “everyone carries their mobile with them all the time” heading. If you have 20,000 festival goers, you’re looking at 20,000 people with phones in their pockets. Speaking from experience, for really popular festivals you have to book your tickets ages in advance, and then leave your ticket somewhere safe until the date arrives. If it’s a barcode you can just store on your phone, it’s less of a hassle. And Trinity Mobile supports all the major 2d and 1d barcode standards (QR Code, Datamatrix, Aztec, EAN, UPC and more), so a wide range of scanners will be useful.