Tiqets, a ticketing technology platform for museums, entertainment, and other local attractions, says it has received $1 million in seed funding from various non-institutional investors.
This funding is in addition to the $450,000 from Dutch venture firm Investion that was announced last month.
Tiqets helps event suppliers deliver and distribute mobile redeemable (barcoded) tickets.
A "last mile" solution
Amsterdam-based Tiqets (pronounced like "tickets" in English) says it has 20 salaried employees, including 10 full-time technical workers.
The startup, which began doing business in August 2014, is focused on enabling events and attractions suppliers to handle mobile bookings and to market ancillary sales to customers via various channels.
A case in point: a hotel might want to sell guest direct bookable and redeemable tickets to a local venue for the same day. (See Tiqet's startup pitch on Tnooz.)
Speed is a key issue. While about 60% of customers want to book within 48 hours of arrival, a majority of suppliers is not yet technically able to provide instant availability or to accept mobile tickets.
For small venues, the appeal of working with Tiqets is that it can boost the volume of businesses, because it has distribution deals with more than 40 suppliers, including Arrival Guides and some online travel agencies and airlines.
For large organizations, such as world-famous museums, there is little appeal in incremental business because they already experience high demand.
To appeal to large entities, Tiqets offers marketing insight into who their customers are, along with tools to cross sell to other venues and get more revenue out of their visitors.
Said CEO Luuc Elzinga in a phone interview:
"While TripAdvisor-owned Viator, one of our largest suppliers, has done a great job in connecting venues of all sizes to digital sales, it is not focused on the last-mile of ticketing, such as all the work that's necessary to get an attraction to be able to handle bookings made on booking devices.
In much of the world, this is still a paper-based business, driven by vouchers purchased in advance. We’re digitizing the last part.
This takes work, so our goal is to go city-by-city, starting with the 30 largest markets.
While we sell events in 2,000 locations worldwide, our emphasis in 2015 is in developing seamless end-to-end processes for mobile ticketing and ancillary sales in the largest markets.
No one wants to do this because margins are less than tours. But if you really want to give people a good experience, you must change this through automation, rather than do a MacGyver on an antiquated system with paper vouchers and manual counts."
Tiqets claims that its open API offers access to 15 million tickets for more than 1 million tours, concerts, restaurants, sports, museums, theatre performances, and other activities.
To clarify, Tiqets is not in the point-of-sale, ticket management business, like Rezgo. Nor is it in the content management system or the customer relationship management business, like TourCMS.
MORE: Tiqet's startup pitch on Tnooz.