How We Helped Save Time and Trees via Digital Entries at Events

Imagine you’re getting ready to go see a major music festival or an international cricket match. One that you’ve been waiting to attend for long. You manage to leave the house early but get stuck in traffic. Several shortcuts and a few outbursts later, you somehow reach the venue on time just to find yourself in a long, endless queue at the box office because your digital ticket has to be exchanged for a physical one to enter. What a bummer, right?

Unlike movie theatres, events in the past did not accept tickets if they were saved on your phone and allowed you to go through if and only if you had a (legit) physical one on you. Now, physical tickets do come with an extremely secure and ‘no internet required during entry’ policy, but they also bring along the hassles of ‘standing in a never-ending queue’ for fans and ‘setting up an expensive box office’ for organisers.

Having said that, we questioned whether it’s fair for both the fans and organisers to face these hurdles every time one’s attending or putting together a good show. Being one of India’s largest entertainment ticketing platform and the bridge that connects both parties, we decided to make entries completely digital at big events (why should movie theatres have all the fun?).

We took the digital entry setup live for the very first time on 5th October, 2018 in the Hero Indian Super League where the Kerala Blasters FC were facing the Mumbai City FC at the Jawaharlal Nehru International Stadium, Kochi. After the system had shown promise during the beta phase, we were confident it would work wonders at a big event. Over 35,000 fans who attended the match enjoyed the convenient and seamless entry.

And like all great stories, there was no looking back for us after that. Paytm Insider has initiated digital entries for over 232 large scale events till date out of which 100 were within the first three months of execution. You may know some of these events as the Martin Garrix music festival, the matches featuring Kerala Blaster FC, Mumbai City FC, and the Delhi Dynamos FC in the Indian Super League, 5 out of 7 ODIs of the Australia tour of India earlier this year, Supermoon ft. Russell Peters Deported World Tour, Lil Flea, and so many more.

The best part about making the entries digital at large scale events is that not only are your tickets secure but also you don’t need the internet to scan them at the entry. Let’s see it this way:

If you’re a Fan

• Never wait at the event box office again
• Spend more time inside than outside
• Take home wonderful memories and a seamless experience

If you’re an Organiser

• Never go through the cost and hassles of managing a box office
• Sit back relaxed as operations are taken care of smoothly
• Smile because you gave the fans a seamless experience

Going paperless at events has helped us in a great way to give back to the planet. Here’s a simple calculation. If we combine all the events, 0.7 million digital entries were welcomed to date. The total weight of paper required to print 0.7 million tickets would be 1,000 kgs (that’s a lot of trees). But then, concerns regarding the planet are always taken seriously at Paytm Insider and a zero waste office is a small way to show it.