The 2017 UK festival season in numbers
September has drawn to a close, which means the curtain has finally fallen on yet another spectacular festival season. We’ll take a look back at the importance of festivals to TicketSwap and some key stats from the season in the UK and beyond.
In August 2012, then student and future-TicketSwap CEO, Hans Ober, had an extra ticket to the legendary Lowlands Festival that he needed to sell quickly. Having no choice but to search for potential buyers on Marktplaats (the Netherlands’ equivalent to Gumtree or Craigslist) and Facebook, Hans eventually sold the ticket after much effort spent on convincing people online he was not a scammer or a tout but rather a student on a budget who just wanted his money back (the transaction took place in person and involved the exchange of the e-ticket, banking details and a lot of suspicion). This problem, which is familiar to festival-goers around the world, provided the inspiration for TicketSwap: a simple, safe and fair way for fans to buy and sell spare tickets for festivals, concerts and any other event with tickets. Within three weeks of coming up with the idea, Hans and his two co-founders launched a beta-version of TicketSwap.
With our company history starting with a single festival ticket, it’s no real surprise that TicketSwap has grown to become a trusted tool in any festival-goer’s arsenal. Festivals, more so than any other ticketed event, seek to build a sense of community during the course of the week, weekend or day that fans come together to party, who among us hasn’t made best friends after 5 minutes with strangers they bumped into at a festival?
It is this festival community feeling with which TicketSwap’s ethos of trust, transparency and fairness resonate. We help you spread the love you have for a given festival to another fan who will take the opportunity to enjoy themselves just as much as you would have. TicketSwap often takes fans on a journey from despair (i.e not being able to attend anymore because your second cousin Charlene decided to get married, or missing out on the general sale tickets because who the hell remembers to buy tickets at 9:01 on a Friday morning? or being too broke to spend 200 quid on an event 3 months from now) to delight (‘I just sold my ticket to another fan in 2 minutes without even putting on shoes’ or snagging 2 tickets for cheaper than face value during the week of the festival). For all of this and more, TicketSwap and festivals go hand in hand for fans across the world; which also means we are uniquely placed to share our insights from the festival season. Here’s our pick of the interesting stats from the 2017 summer festival season:
All Stars
The Top 3 UK Festivals on TicketSwap in terms of ticket resales on TicketSwap.
London’s top event organiser, LWE, stole the show with 2 fantastic festivals, Junction 2 in early June and Elrow Town in August. DnB fanatics Hospitality close out the Top 3 with their second edition of Hospitality in the Park. However, the most in-demand festival (i.e the highest ratio of people looking for tickets vs tickets sold on TS) was South West Four, with a 7 to 1 ratio.
August = Festival Time
With over 60 major festivals up and down the country and a convenient bank holiday to boot, August was the crescendo of festival season in the UK. This was reflected on TicketSwap, with August being the top month in terms of festival ticket sales. Interestingly, it was not the most ‘effective’ month of the festival season for TicketSwap users: 97% of all festival tickets listed for sale on TicketSwap during the month of August were sold to another fan compared with 99% in June.
Speedy Sales
At TicketSwap, one of most important measures of success is the length of time between tickets being listed for sale by one fan and bought by another. One way to measure that is to establish what percent of tickets have been sold within an hour. Currently, TicketSwap global average is over 50% sold within 1 hour. For certain festivals in the UK this summer, this global average was surpassed. For One Dance Outdoor Festival in London, 77% of all tickets listed were sold within an hour, and amazingly 34% of all tickets were actually already sold within 5 minutes. The runner up was Boomtown Fair in Winchester with 72% sold after an hour and 25% gone after 5 minutes.
Brits Abroad
Who doesn’t love a holiday…and, more importantly, who doesn’t love a party in a foreign land? It seems that British TicketSwap users have been combining these dual-loves to great effect during the festival season. Over 3000 Brits used TicketSwap to snag tickets for a festival outside of the British Isles. Unsurprisingly, the top destination for UK festival-goers buying tickets abroad is the Netherlands (43%), the electronic music festival mecca and also where TicketSwap has been active the longest. But very close behind is Spain with over 31.3 % of all British festival purchases abroad. For those looking a bit further a field, Hungary (9.5%) and Croatia (8.7%) are almost neck and neck, with Sziget and Dekmantel Selectors being the most popular festivals, respectively.
Having a great time at festival depends on a lot of factors — group of friends, the weather, the location, the lineup, the atmosphere — but they all start with having a ticket and having enough funds to get yourself to and through the event. Built by music fans, for music fans, TicketSwap empowers fans to make a last-minute decision to jump on the festival bandwagon without paying a ludicrous price and conversely enables fans to sell their spare or unwanted festival tickets to other fans instead of seeing them go to waste. From certainty and speed of sale to access to the best festivals, our platform goes hand in hand with any UK festival experience, whether that be at home or across Europe.
