Hard vs. paperless tickets: the jury is still out

While acknowledging that paperless tickets – primarily e-tickets and those delivered via cell phones – is the wave of the future, a group of electronic ticket company executives Thursday admitted that several issues surrounding the use of paperless tickets are still being worked out.

The executives addressed some of the issues of hard and paperless tickets at a morning discussion panel on the subject during the first day of Ticket Summit 2008 at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. They agreed that there will likely always be hard tickets, whether for people or corporations who want a tangible copy for souvenirs or other reasons, they also believe that the use of paperless tickets will continue to grow dramatically in the coming years.

"You'll see more and more tickets delivered by cell phone with a barcode. This is absolutely the same as the hard or paper ticket but only on your phone," said Gary Schwartz, CEO of mobile ticketing company Impact Mobile. He used a music analogy to describe the evolution of tickets with vinyl records representing old paper tickets, the CD representing online tickets, and the MP3 representing mobile tickets.

The UK and European markets are more advanced as it relates to the use of paperless tickets, according to Rob Clegg, commercial director at UK-based mobile ticketing company Trinity Mobile, who said estimates project the number of paperless tickets delivered by 2011 to exceed 2.6 billion in the UK and Europe. Both executives said that mobile ticketing companies could deliver barcoded cell phone tickets right now on any U.S. wireless carrier and make similar scanning hardware available in the States.

Despite the growing acceptance of the use of mobile tickets, several brokers in the audience questioned the ability to easily transfer tickets through secondary tickets channels, and also worried that customer and business data would potentially become too insecure.

Guy Villa, vice president of sales for Veritix, which owns Flash Seats, said that currently people give their own data away to super markets with barcode systems and don't think twice about it, and since 64 percent of sports tickets are used by someone other than the original purchaser of the ticket, teams want to know who is sitting in those seats.

"You guys [ticket brokers] facilitate sales for venues and teams, so they don't want to disturb that," he said, but added that teams increasingly want to know information on the people who attend their games for marketing reasons and to help combat the use of counterfeit tickets.

Don Vaccaro, CEO of TicketNetwork, hosts of Ticket Summit, said that despite some of the concerns about data protection and ticket transferability, brokers are already doing a "phenomenal job" reselling e-tickets, and that it will never end the use of hard tickets.

"Venues are going to have to decide whether they will expend the time and energy to explain all the options to their customers," he said. "And, I think they will because consumers will pay a premium to be able to freely transfer tickets."