Further building on its relationship with baseball ticket sales, Tickets.com and StubHub are teaming up with 3-dimentional mapping software company Ballena Technologies to offer customers enhanced seating maps for ticketing. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The partnership will allow customers to view real-time, 3-D seating information at a venue for both primary and secondary tickets at the same time, which the companies said is a first. The San Francisco Giants, which recently made news because the team will experiment with dynamic ticket pricing this season, will be the first ballclub to use the new mapping system under the new partnership.
“The Giants organization prides itself on being a leader in the adoption of technology to improve the fan experience,” Russ Stanley, managing vice president of ticket services and client relations for the San Francisco Giants, said in a statement. “The combination of primary and secondary ticket inventory on a Ballena map continues that tradition.”
Clicking on seats in the 3-D maps will allow fans to buy tickets from either Tickets.com or StubHub, which will improve transparency and give fans more opportunity to evaluate pricing options. “Giving Giants fans the ability to view both primary and secondary ticket availability from the same map will enhance the fan experience and provide an additional customer acquisition channel for us,” said Jeff Spaulding, director of business development for StubHub, in a statement.
Venue seat mapping has been around for years, but several companies, in addition to Tickets.com, StubHub and Ballena Technologies, are pushing the envelope by improving sight lines and functionality, including and Live Nation and TicketNews’s parent company TicketNetwork.
“The Ballena integration is another example of our strategy to leverage best-in-class partners to help us release innovative products into the ticketing marketplace,” said Brett Michalak, chief information officer for Tickets.com, in a statement. Tickets.com is owned by Major League Baseball, and the company and StubHub signed their secondary ticketing partnership in 2007.
