Radiant Systems Expands Relationship with San Francisco Giants

New loaded-ticket program capitalizes on technology to give fans more value for game ticket price

Reuters

Radiant Systems, Inc. announced a new agreement with the San Francisco Giants to be a key provider of the new loaded-ticket system, a season-ticket-holder incentive deemed so successful by team officials that they have taken steps to open the program to all fans at AT&T Park.

"We looked at a number of ticket-technology systems, but the Quest solution really stood out based on what we are trying to achieve in the future," said Russ Stanley, managing vice president of ticket services and client relations for the San Francisco Giants. "We originally tested the concept in a limited area with our season-ticket holders during the renewal process and had great success. I am so pleased with where we are now, that we have gone ahead and moved on to offering loaded tickets to individuals with single-game tickets. The only limiting factor to this program is our imagination."

Combining Uptix, (a joint venture between Givex and Tickets.com) and the Quest solution, loaded tickets allow extra monetary value to be added to a game-day ticket for use at concession stands as well as in premium food and beverage areas. Teams can use loaded tickets to offer incentives to fans in certain sections or attract season ticket holders by storing data on each ticket, including cash value or vouchers for specific uses. Ticket purchasers can also use the loaded-ticket option to store cash value on their own tickets or on tickets being given as gifts.

The Quest VersaTerm and V-Touch hardware, along with more than 300 Symbol LS2208 barcode scanners by Motorola give the San Francisco Giants fans the ability to easily redeem loaded tickets at concession areas and from premium seats at AT&T Park.

Deciding to test the technology on a small, specific audience, the Giants unveiled the loaded-ticket program to season-ticket holders in the view-reserved infield seats at AT&T Park. By offering a $5 credit on each ticket, the team realized a 10 percent increase in renewals within the targeted section. The Giants knew this technology could keep them ahead of industry downturns, as baseball clubs around the country report drops in ticket sales.

When paired with the Quest solution, loaded tickets offer venues the opportunity to tailor special incentives to fans and increase sales. One great benefit of the Quest solution is its ability to seamlessly integrate with other programs creating a system that gives sports teams the ability to implement exciting and cutting edge offers to fans.

"Fans want something exciting and entertaining when they arrive at the ballpark," said Scott Kingsfield, president of the sports and entertainment division at Radiant Systems. "The Quest solution allows teams to be as creative as possible, without ever needing to change venue technology. We stay right in step with every idea and each new incentive."

About Radiant Systems, Inc.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Radiant Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: RADS) is a global provider of innovative technology to the hospitality and retail industries. For more than two decades, Radiant`s point of sale hardware and software solutions have helped to redefine the consumer experience in more than 100,000 restaurants, retail stores, stadiums, parks, arenas, cinemas, convenience stores, fuel centers and other customer-service venues. Radiant has offices in North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. For more information, visit www.radiantsystems.com

Tickets.com Product Highlight: Uptix Stored Value

Uptix Stored Value

Uptix broadens the traditional ticket function of event access by securely enabling individual tickets to store other kinds of data, such as cash value. These “loaded” tickets can then be used for redemption at various points of sale in your venue (e.g., concessions, retail stands). You can now offer a complete entertainment experience with a single event ticket! Uptix™ is jointly developed and provided in partnership with Givex®.

Learn more about Uptix stored value tickets >

Innovation, with Mustard and Relish

By Jim McCarthy
Live 2.0

Ok, ok, it’s a press release and not a true news story, but read this anyway. Here’s the key tidbit:

“Tickets.com and closed loop card technologies provider Givex conducted a successful pilot of their stored value technology, Uptix(TM), at the Giants 16th Annual FanFest at AT&T Park in San Francisco.”

Translating that out of Press Release-ian, it means that the San Francisco Giants tested a program whereby you can use the ticket you bought to get into an event to then get stuff once you go in.

For example, you might buy a $25 seat and have a hot dog and a beer as “stored value.” The sticker price for all that could be $35, for example, but you pay just $30.

Another example is that you might get your ticket through a certain promotion at the regular face value, but if you take it to the souvenir stand, you get a pennant or a t-shirt. All of that would be encoded on your ticket.

Actually, Russ Stanley of the Giants mentioned this briefly in his article in the Inaugural Edition, but it’s interesting to see this unfolding in real life.

(Do I even have to do the full disclosure thing that we (Goldstar) work with both the Giants and Tickets.com? Ok, we do. Generally assume we work with everyone, and you’ll have to put up with this disclosures less often.)

Again, in Press Release-ian, Tickets.com says this feature “provides myriad promotional and sponsorship opportunities including rewards tied to on-field events.”

Translating that into English, it means you could do a lot of different things with it.

Baseball has been pioneering this area, but it’s not by any means limited. Why couldn’t an opera “store” intermission drinks on the ticket? Or maybe Cirque Du Soleil could “store” a DVD of the performance on the ticket.

These ideas are good and possibly very useful, but mildly boring (plus the Giants beat us to it), and surely, we can do better than that. How about “storing” access to an after-party or an online downloadable?

Here’s a crazy idea: how about “storing” the possibility of being involved in the show? In other words, if your bar code is the one identified as the winner, at some point during the performance, the performers will actually involve you in the show. They’ll just be told in advance where the person will be who is to be included.

Ok, let’s try this. Any other uses for ’stored’ value? I’ll give a couple tickets on Goldstar to the one I like best. (Goldstar employees, you can give ideas too, but you can’t win the tickets. Sorry about that.) If I don’t get any suggestions, I will award the tickets to myself, which would be sad.

Submit Ideas >

Venues Today Q&A with Steve DeMots

Venues Today Q&A
STEVE DEMOTS, TICKETS.COM
Dave Brooks

Tickets.com is continuing to expand the capabilities of its new ProVenue software suite and has signed a deal with gift card maker Givex to create Uptix, a stored value system for event tickets. The San Francisco Giants will premier the system this season.

Has the dream of combining concessions and tickets into a single purchasing experience finally come to the Big Leagues? Venues Today caught up with Tickets.com’s Sr. V.P. of Business Development Steve DeMots to learn more.

Venues Today: We’ve heard about this concept for a few years now. What is Tickets.com doing with stored value?
Steve DeMots: Our overall strategy right now is to focus on the core ticketing technology. All our additional functionality is being developed through strategic partnerships, so instead of building stored value ourselves, we partnered with one of the largest gift card companies in the world — Givex out of Toronto. We created a product with them called Uptix; our stored value offering.

VT: How does it work?
SD: In a nutshell, it means having a separate database that keeps track of value tied into the barcode on the ticket. What the Phillies have done with their own stored value system is take one of their $60 seats and make it into a $90 seat with $30 worth of stored value. Through the barcode, you can go to any POS station and redeem the remaining value on the ticket. The other way it is used is to add stored value on an existing ticket. A corporate season ticket holder can use the system to load concessions money onto the barcode of the ticket. This allows the corporate ticket holder to give his client four tickets and $40 each (or whatever amount they choose) to spend on concessions.

VT: How does the season ticket-holder manage his stored value account?
SD: The system has a customer portal for online management of stored value accounts. Imagine that a season ticket holder has a $1,000 of stored value that floats over their season package. This system allows them to assign different dollar amounts to different tickets.

VT: What kind of promotional opportunities can the teams build into the stored value system?
SD: Tons. Let’s use a hypothetical example. Imagine you’re an Angels fan and Coke sponsors a promotion that if Vladimir Guerrero hits a homerun in the 7th inning, everyone in section 330 gets $15 worth of Coke products, valid for that day. If he did hit a homerun, you could do a mass upload onto everyone’s ticket in that particular section, and that value could only be used to purchase Coke products. The promotional opportunities are endless.

VT: What happens with any left over money on the ticket?
SD: It can be used anywhere else in the park. It’s almost the same as a gift card, but instead of a magnetic strip you’re using the barcode on the ticket.

VT: Can you get a refund of your remaining balance?
SD: It’s all business rules of the individual client. Some clients have a “use-it-or-lose-it” mentality.

VT: Aren’t there federal laws mandating that vendors can’t take left over gift card balances?
SD: Yes there are. But, many teams are calling stored value a “coupon” because it's no longer a $60 seat with a $30 gift certificate. It’s now a $90 seat with a $30 coupon. If, however, someone buys additional value on their ticket through a customer portal, then the teams are subject to federal gift card laws.

VT: Which teams are implementing stored value?
SD: The Phillies are using Paciolan software and they’ve developed their own system. The Giants will be using Uptix this season with ProVenue. The competitor is a company called STADIS, which has launched stored value with the Washington Nationals and the Pittsburgh Pirates.

VT: What is your projected growth for Uptix?
SD: Within the next few years, a majority of the sports and entertainment organizations that have a lot of season tickets will have some type of stored value product. It intrigues everyone. The key is getting your arms around it on a venue-by-venue basis and deciding what you want to accomplish.

Learn more about Tickets.com ticketing technologies >

Royals, Indians will join MLB clubs selling stored-value tickets

Sports Business Journal
By DON MURET
Staff writer

The Kansas City Royals and Cleveland Indians will introduce stored-value tickets at their ballparks this season, bringing to eight the number of clubs that will have the technology in place on Opening Day.

Loaded tickets are a ballpark admission with credit to buy food, drink and merchandise loaded into the bar code and folded into the price of a ticket.

The Royals are benching their all-you-can-eat program in favor of loaded tickets in several parts of renovated Kauffman Stadium, including 190 seats in the Diamond Club boxes behind home plate.

Those $70 seats, available only as full-season tickets, include a $20 concessions credit, and were 75 percent sold as of last week, said Mark Tilson, the Royals’ vice president of marketing and ticket sales.

The Indians will roll out their program at Progressive Field to a small number of season-ticket holders, said spokesman Curtis Danburg. The team will expand the program to include groups and single-game tickets later in the season.In addition, the New York Mets plan to offer a combination of stored-value tickets and loyalty cards later in the season after making sure all systems work smoothly at Citi Field, their new billion-dollar ballpark, said Dave Howard, executive vice president of business operations.

The St. Louis Cardinals hope to sell loaded tickets at Busch Stadium, but nothing was firm as of last week, said Joe Strohm, vice president of ticket sales. The Arizona Diamondbacks will make a decision in February whether to offer stored-value tickets in 2009, spokesman Shaun Rachau said.

IMS, the software vendor supplying equipment to six MLB teams, has data dating to 2004, when the Philadelphia Phillies opened Citizens Bank Park and became the first club to use the concept. The information shows that fans holding loaded tickets spend 40 percent to 60 percent more on concessions than those without stored-value tickets, said Jeff Harvey, IMS’ vice president of sales.

The firm’s data also show that “breakage,” the industry term used to describe unused value on loaded tickets, can generate significant returns, averaging 36 percent, Harvey said. The Phillies’ breakage numbers are much smaller, according to John Weber, the team’s vice president of sales and ticket operations. The Phillies sold 90,000 “Power Tickets” containing a $10 credit, and breakage averaged 10 percent to 15 percent, Weber said.

In that case, breakage produced $90,000 to $135,000 in revenue, not including the park’s 350 Diamond Club seats with $30 in value. Still, it’s an element that weighed heavily in the Royals’ decision to use loaded tickets.“It’s a compelling part of the technology,” Tilson said. “The fact that it could pay for itself and ultimately lead to a legitimate revenue stream helped us make the decision to invest in the technology.”

In this recession, some teams don’t have the six-figure sum to pay for installing the software and hardware and back-of-house support. That’s the case at Minute Maid Park in Houston, said Bill Goren, the Astros’ director of ticket sales. “We would have to spend a lot of money [and] it’s not in the budget for this year,” Goren said.

The Royals spent $150,000 for their IMS system. In conjunction with Aramark, their new concessionaire, officials thought it made perfect sense to start promoting loaded tickets now that Kauffman Stadium’s two-year, $250 million renovation nears completion and they can make a fresh start with a redesigned seating bowl.

Stored-value tickets are also available in Kansas City for group sales, family four-pack promotions on Fridays and Sundays and single-game sales, available in increments as low as $5. There is no set limit on the number of tickets that can have value added, Tilson said.

The Royals sold a little more than 17,000 all-you-can-eat tickets in 2008, generating $455,000 in gross revenue. The common complaint among fans buying those tickets was a limited menu; loaded tickets now provide the opportunity for them to buy whatever they want, Tilson said.

“We are waiting to see the reaction of not having all-you-can-seat seats,” he said.