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- Investing in a new reservations system can sometimes feel like a cost-prohibitive and daunting initiative at the best of times. How do you know if your existing system even needs to be replaced? The most common questions we hear are around price and what sort of financial impacts will result.
- Investing in a new reservations system can sometimes feel like a cost-prohibitive and daunting initiative at the best of times. How do you know if your existing system even needs to be replaced? The most common questions we hear are around price and what sort of financial impacts will result.
- What You Should Look For…
Before we dive into the details, allow me to provide some background information that may help in your buying journey. The ideal ticketing and reservations system built for bus and coach operators, should be cloud-based, scalable and always improving. Why? It’s not a fixed piece of software. It should expand to the size of your business, but more importantly, adapt to your customer’s evolving demands through continuous innovations in feature development and ongoing enhancements. It should free up resources within your company, and improve efficiencies through extreme automation – giving you the freedom to actually focus on running your business versus trying to be a technology company.
- What You Should Look For…
If you’re running a smaller or medium sized business, you should pay a relative price. If you run a larger organization, you should benefit from a lower rate and volume based discounts. No matter what stage your business is in, a top-notch, platform must adapt to the size of your operation and offer your business a multitude of benefits.
How much does a ticket management system cost?
Most ticket management software companies offer an upfront fee and a price per ticket booking. Some companies will hide their price by stating their software is free, but then charge a higher fee per ticket. In general, per ticket fees can range from $0.25 to $2 or more per ticket. For lower ticket priced operators, fees can range from 1-3% of revenue. For larger organizations there may be an implementation fee depending on how they choose to customize the platform for their operation.
Additional fees that are part of a digital ticket management system include:
- -Payments: Credit card processing fees of 2-3% plus a fixed transaction fee
- -Hardware: Fees for hardware (e.g., ticket counter POS or mobile scanners) based on preference and your business needs
- -Custom apps: It is still possible, that after all of this you will still be left with some custom logic that you require to automate. Anything that is truly unique to your operation could be handled outside the system with a custom app. While we recommend trying to avoid these costs as much as possible, based on your size and needs, you may want to leave some budget aside for some custom programming
While an investment in a cloud-based ticket management system will likely involve an ongoing monthly cost, it is still more cost-effective to use an out-of-the-box system, versus building it yourself. Making the right choice early on can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars over time, not to mention time! Launching an ‘out-of-the-box’ system can take as little as one week to go live.
What Kind of Features Can You Expect in a System?
A high-quality ticket management system will offer you the option to include:
- -Mobile booking engine
- -Dynamic pricing
- -Real-time reporting
- -Customer intelligence
- -Integrations to other systems
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- -Promo codes
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- -Ongoing feature releases
- -Loyalty
- -Seat maps
- -Scanning
- -Third Party Selling
- -Scheduling Tools
The price of a system can vary significantly depending on what features you need. Many standard systems just include a basic booking platform. A more advanced solution can offer additional features and opportunities to earn other streams of revenue. Some of our own customers have experienced double digit growth simply from being able to increase their distribution by selling through third parties.
While the cost of ticketing and reservations system can vary, depending on the type of solution you require, I hope this article gives you a sense of what to expect when sourcing a cloud-based platform to grow your business.
Looking to get a quote on your next system? Get in touch!