How to problem solve mobile tickets
If there is one issue we face all the time, it’s mobile tickets — how to accept them, how to use them, and how to transfer them. I’ll do my best to explain the evolution towards mobile tickets, how they work, and why you’ll love them once you learn how to use them.
Physical Tickets
Many of our clients prefer physical tickets for their simplicity: once you have them in your hand, using them is simple. Many venues, however, are phasing out physical tickets. They are doing this for three main reasons:
- They work until they don’t — our clients will often send their tickets to their clients only to find they bail at the last minute. Or, sometimes, tickets get lost. Couriering tickets around the city or getting new ones sent is a bit of a logistical nightmare.
- Venues want to know who is sitting in their seats — In the age of data, knowing everything you can about the people attending is important for ticket sellers.
- Duplicate tickets— While not common for physical tickets printed by a sports teams, print-at-home tickets can be duplicated infinite times. There was always a risk of multiple copies laying around.
Mobile tickets offer a nice solution to all three of these issues: they can be transferred multiple times; each attendee has an account (so venues know who is there); and each time a ticket is transferred a new QR code is generated voiding the previous version of the ticket.
Mobile Tickets
What is a mobile ticket? A mobile ticket will have a QR code, rather than a bar code. You can see the difference below:
The most basic element of mobile tickets is that you cannot print them. Arriving at the venue with printed mobile tickets, would be the same as arriving at the venue with no ticket at all.
How to accept mobile tickets. Mobile tickets are most commonly transferred via email. You will receive an email from the person sending you your ticket(s), with a link (or button) that allows you to accept the tickets. Clicking on this link will take you to a website that suggests you either log into your account or create a new account.
One of the most common mistakes is confusing your Ticketmaster account with a team account, which is operated by Ticketmaster, but will not necessarily have the same log in details. A team account will have your team name in the URL and will look like this in the address bar: am.ticketmaster.com/YOURTEAM/#/ whereas a traditional Ticketmaster account will not have the team name in the URL. For example, the Miami Heat will have the following URL in the address bar: https://am.ticketmaster.com/heat/#/
If this is your first time on the team account management website, there is a good chance you will need to create a new account. To accept the ticket, after following the steps to either create or login to your account, accepting the tickets should be straightforward.
How to access your mobile tickets. It is important to make sure you can access your tickets on your mobile phone. To do this, you will need to download the team (or venue) app to your phone. You can find the team app in either the Google Play or Apple App store). Sometimes, rather than downloading the Team app, you will need to download the venue app. For example, the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars use the American Airlines Center app rather than their own team apps to manage mobile tickets. If you are unsure which app you need to download, you can email us and we’ll be happy to let you know.
Use the login details on the app that you used to accept the tickets. Navigating to your tickets in the app is usually straightforward; however, you may need to navigate first to “arena”, or clicking on “more”, both in the lower toolbar.
Transferring mobile tickets. Once you have found the tickets in your app, transferring them will be as easy as viewing the QR code. You can transfer all the tickets to one person, or send each person attending the event with you their ticket. This allows every person to arrive on their own schedule, if that’s easiest.
The person receiving the mobile tickets would go through the same steps above to accept and access their tickets. Tickets can be transferred infinite times; however, once transferred, the recipient owns them and the only way to get them back is if they transfer them back to you. (Think of this like mailing your physical tickets — they would need to agree to mail the tickets back to you).
It is important to stress that once someone accepts a transfer the previous transfer is voided, so only the person with the most recently accepted transfer has a legitimate ticket. This avoids the problem of duplicate tickets.
Questions?
While mobile tickets can be a bit confusing to start, once you have done it a couple times, they become second nature. If you have any questions at all, feel free to post them below. Alternatively, you can always email us at concierge@robin.live.
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