For the sale of tickets, the Fest Team relies on the Ticketstation system. For four months, the Bulgarian promoter has been working to improve the purchase process in order to minimize attacks and ticket reselling. Among the innovations are a virtual waiting room that reduces the load on the site, entering the names of ticket holders and limiting the purchase to a maximum of six tickets.
On the very first day of sale, the Fest Team released 95% of the entire amount of tickets, the price of which varies between BGN 140 and BGN 300. However, the great interest in the concert led to virtual queues of over 180,000 people and a number of complaints from fans, who after hours of waiting, they were unable to buy tickets and found themselves again finally in line. “The queue counted everyone who tried to get to the site from the time the tickets were released until the specific time, i.e. 100 thousand people from 9 am to 12 pm entered the site. The actual load was about 60-80 thousand people” , specifies Elenkov from the Fest Team.
A few hours after the initial euphoria, access to the system was already without a queue, and three weeks later there were still tickets on sale, but only for the stadium field. According to Elenkov, over 50,000 tickets were sold in the first 24 hours, compared to 19,000 for Madonna’s concert in 2009. “This, combined with the capacity, the production, the logistics and the number of people who will take part, makes Ed Sheeran’s concert the biggest ever organized in Bulgaria.” According to the promoter, 98% of all purchased tickets for the concert came from Bulgaria.
Thanks to the secured system, the Fest Team points out that Sofia is one of the few locations for which there is no resale of tickets on the largest platform Viagogo. “We will not allow a ticket bought for BGN 140 to be resold for EUR 300. The Bulgarian audience loses from this, and we as promoters also lose,” says Elenkov.
