Silicon.com on Mobile Ticketing

Mobile ticketing gets groovy in club trial

'If your name's not on the phone, you're not coming in'

By Gemma Simpson

Published: Wednesday 29 November 2006

London club Minstry of Sound has completed a live trial of end-to-end mobile ticketing that saw clubbers able to buy, receive and redeem tickets on their phones.

The clubbers, who must be registered PayPal users, started the process by sending a text to a number designated by the Minstry of Sound. This activated an interactive voice-response callback which confirmed the ticket request by asking the caller to authenticate their PayPal PIN. Once confirmed, a mobile ticket was delivered to the handset in the form of a text message.

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♦ Mobile location-based services
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The text 'ticket' contained another PIN number which was verified at the nightclub's doors when revellers turned up to a student night at the London club.

Felicity Ive, head of strategic brand partnerships at the Ministry of Sound, told silicon.com consumers were receptive to the mobile tickets and said "we will be looking to use mobile ticketing in the future".

The next step would be to use barcode mobile ticketing, in which an electronic barcode is sent to the ticket buyer's mobile phone via text message. This method is quicker to process when clubgoers arrive at the venue, requiring just a scan of the mobile phone as opposed to manually entering a PIN number, Ive added.

Around 1,100 people came through the club doors on the night of the trial, with roughly 10 per cent using the mobile ticketing service.

High-tech ticketing methods are popping up in a wide variety of venues with Fulham FC issuing RFID football tickets, the Eden Project adopting mobile queue jumping and Chiltern Railways trialling mobile train tickets .