By announcing a Christmas Baking Challenge in the office, we asked some of our best office bakers to show off their skills.

Our judges Natalie, Marco and Lex tried a range of goodies and selected our office winner: Marion’s “Hexenhaus” won the challenge for being stylish, fancy and delicious.

Not for free we said, we wanted to share some of the Christmas feelings with
Crisis. For every goodie we collected donations for rehousing and supporting the homeless in London this Christmas, when they are most vulnerable.

Harvey will be joining us as Senior Advisor, while Ian will be our new Chairman of the Board.

Harvey Goldsmith CBE is a visionary producer and promoter of rock concerts, charity events and television broadcasts, with achievements in the industry stretching back over more than 50 years. He has produced, managed and promoted shows with most of the world’s major artists and was responsible for the two largest music events the world has ever seen: Live Aid and Live 8.

A well known name in the travel industry, McCaig joined the founders and the board of lastminute.com in 2003 when it was still a public company. He was appointed CEO in 2006 following the sale of lastminute.com to Sabre Corporation for $1.1bn and led the development of the business for a further five years.

We believe that these appointments mark another major step forward in helping deliver on our mission to become the world’s largest two-sided platform for live events.

Zack Sabban, our CEO & co-founder, commented: “We’re so happy to welcome both Ian and Harvey to the company. Having admired their careers from afar for some time, to be able to have them join the Festicket family at this exciting time and help accelerate us to the next level in our development is something we’re very pleased to have been able to make happen.”

We’re incredibly pleased to today announce the release of our brand new feature: Pay with Friends.

As I’m sure many of you can relate to, booking a festival with friends can at times be a pretty stressful experience, particularly for the one who steps up to shoulder the initial payment, only to spend weeks trying to get back money from the rest of the group.

Pay with Friends aims to alleviate that by allowing the lead booker to reserve the booking for their whole group while only having to pay for their part of the payment upfront. The other members of the group then have 48 hours to pay their individual parts.

So how does this actually work?

Once multiple tickets or packages are selected, the lead booker can choose to “Pay with Friends” and split the total payment. The lead booker can then pay for just their individual part of the booking.

After they’ve paid, the lead booker will be able to send a link to the rest of their group through which they can individually pay for their own parts. The tickets will be reserved for 48 hours to give each person in the group time to pay, and once all the portions are paid, the order will be fully confirmed and accessible through each group member’s Festicket account.

If anyone in the group does not pay before the 48 hour deadline, the booking is released and no one is charged. However, there is a small non-refundable deposit charged to the lead booker to reserve the booking.

Zack Sabban, our CEO and Co-founder, comments: “Our goal is to make festival discovery and booking as easy as possible for fans so they can focus on what matters — enjoying the festival. Groups are a big priority for us as the group is usually an important part of the festival experience.

We already have a designated sales team for assisting groups with their booking. Now we’re the first ticketing company to offer a feature like this specifically designed for group payments. It’s exciting to be leading the way with this lifesaver for lead bookers.”

In 2012, our founders Zack and John started Festicket with the idea of building a powerful content website for music festivals around the globe. Our now famous festival guides were born from a desire to capture the different festival atmospheres and help users discover new experiences.

The concept of festival trips soon followed, and after a fabled (although failed) trip to Coachella, Zack and John went about creating a valuable service that combined tickets, travel, accommodation and other essentials into the ultimate festival package.

Fast-forward to 2019 and we’re now the world’s largest platform for discovering and booking festival trips, serving an ever-growing community of festival fans across the globe.

However, it’s time to begin our next chapter as today we announce our acquisition of Event Genius and Ticket Arena.

This acquisition will allow us to take advantage of the Event Genius platform, which has developed into a true end-to-end event management system, offering self-service ticketing, access control and POS cashless payments to event organisers.

The new offering to festival organisers will be known as Event Genius by Festicket — which ultimately becomes the most complete end-to-end offering in the live entertainment industry.

This new product will cover everything, including self-service ticketing, accommodation, travel and packages, marketing, data insights and analytics, access control, POS and cashless payment services, fan engagement tools and more.

We believe that by partnering this with our global marketplace and supplier network, we will have a truly unique and disruptive product for the events industry.

Zack Sabban, our CEO and co-founder, commented: “The acquisition transforms Festicket’s product set. In Event Genius, we have found a company that shares our mission to be a disruptive force in the live entertainment market and — ultimately — to bring the best possible experiences to fans. Reshad and the team have built a great product they have good reason to be proud of, and I look forward to welcoming them to the Festicket family.”

Reshad Hossenally, who will join us as Chief Supply Chain Officer, explains: “The Event Genius mission has always been to utilise technology to bring event organisers and consumers a better experience, regardless of the size or type of event. Couple this with Festicket’s global marketplace and supplier network and we have something truly unique for the events industry.”

What does this mean for our clients and customers?

Whilst we have now brought Event Genius and Ticket Arena onboard, it’s very much business as usual and your Account and Campaign Manager will remain the same.

The only difference is we are now able to offer a wider range of ticketing services, including primary ticketing requirements and cashless. If you’d like to discuss this further, please speak to your Business Development contact.

We will now be working away behind the scenes to bring together each of the platforms to create our unique, global offering.

If you have made a booking through us, we can confirm that this news will not affect your order in any way.

Friday, 21st of June 2019 is ‘Bring your Dog to Work Day’ in the UK but at Festicket, every day is ‘Bring your Dog to Work Day’.

We love having dogs in the office and encourage the team to bring in their fluffy friends whenever they like.

Not only are they said to boost productivity and employee morale, but there’s nothing like a snuggle with a pup for relieving stress quickly and putting a smile on our faces.

Meet our regular office pup:

In recent months we’ve formed ‘Festicket United’, an inclusive company-wide football team recruiting members from each department, all of whom are vying for a coveted place in the 7-a-side starting lineup.

Each and every Thursday, come rain or shine, the passionate ‘Eat, Drink, Sleep’ football fans amongst us congregate at our local astroturf pitch to train for the showdown matches against rival companies in the music industry.

Why we’re doing it? It’s an opportunity to stretch the legs and hone our technique on the ball of course, but first-and-foremost it promotes camaraderie, teamwork, and a greater understanding of your colleagues. Thankfully, it also gives the football fans at Festicket a window of opportunity to discuss nothing but football for a few hours. Back of the net!

On top of improved relationships with colleagues, increasing levels of fitness, and the prestige of scoring a long-range fizzer from outside of the area, it’s also helped Festicket strengthen partnerships with other companies within the industry, via a spot of healthy competition.

Having succumbed to a 5–2 defeat to Ticketmaster in our debut outing, Festicket United (supported by our travelling ‘Festicket faithful’ fans) went on to comprehensively defeat London Warehouse Events by 10 goals to 5.

With a potential 2nd leg against LWE and an upcoming clash against DICE, Festicket United is optimistic heading into the next few games entering a rich vein of form!

This year we introduced a number of workplace activities to help our staff stay happy and healthy.

We kicked off summer with a 5k Tough Mudder — 10 of our bravest team members from across different departments took on the obstacle course and absolutely killed it! The course in Finsbury park was made up of 13 obstacles that the crew tackled as a team. 💪

Our newest addition to the social calendar is a fortnightly Yoga class!
75 min of mindfulness, meditation and exercise with our in-house Yoga instructor is the best way to start into the busy work day filled with energy and prepared for the daily challenges ahead. Namaste!

Find out more about Festicket FC next week!

At Festicket, we love a good company social — we love it even more when it’s not only fun but also gets us moving!

We kicked off summer with a 5k Tough Mudder — 10 of our bravest team members from across different departments took on the obstacle course and absolutely killed it! The course in Finsbury park was made up of 13 obstacles which the crew tackled like pros. 💪

Our newest addition to the social calendar is a fortnightly Yoga class.
75 min of mindfulness, meditation and exercise with our in-house Yoga instructor is the best way to start into the busy work day filled with energy and prepared for the daily challenges ahead.
Namaste!

Appearing on TV is a major boost for any brand, so it’s very exciting for a startup like us to be able to launch a major campaign like this.

It was made possible through the media deal we signed with Channel 4’s Commercial Growth Fund, which formed part of our Series D round which we closed in November 2018.

To lead creative direction and production for the 30 second advert, we partnered with Grow@Mindshare. Grow is a specialist entity designed to help start-ups achieve rapid growth — so a perfect fit for our brief.

The ad is a mix of live action and animation, showing the journey of a music fan to her dream festival with a backdrop of changing Festicket brand colours.

Using Festicket, the fan is able to choose her preferred genre, accommodation and travel options to build her perfect trip, clearly showing how there is a festival experience out there for everyone.

See her Festicket journey on Youtube here, or in the wild on Channel 4 and its partner stations until the end of the summer.