The Inaugural Consumer Dinner: What's a ticket worth?

Our first themed dinner took pricing as its subject. Hosted by Paul Byrom (Immediate Live), with Richard Howle of RH Insights guiding the conversation. Richard has spent more than 25 years pricing tickets across arenas, theatre and experiential events, and he opened by taking some heat out of a phrase that has been getting plenty of it.

Dynamic pricing, he pointed out, is much older and much duller than the headlines suggest. It means prices move in response to demand, and in his experience they move down at least as often as up. We all live with variable pricing in fuel, groceries, hotels and flights, and industry dispute-resolution figures suggest only around 1% of escalated ticketing complaints concern it. The weakness he sees in live events is communication and expectation management, which begins with how a show is positioned and marketed long before anyone reaches a checkout page.

He left the table five questions, and they shaped the rest of the night: what dynamic pricing is; where price changes behaviour; what value means to different audiences; when free entry is the right answer; and what AI can usefully contribute.

When capacity is (almost) unlimited

Most consumer exhibitions have no hard supply constraint, so the useful question is not how to ration tickets but what behaviour you want to change.

Day-of-week pricing was the most common lever in the room: cheaper quiet days, premium weekend days, and the afternoon and twilight tickets introduced post-Covid that have stuck because they lift late-day attendance. One organiser has gone the other way and premiumised their opening day at around 40% above the weekend price. Same show, positioned as the exclusive first look, and the market has accepted it.

Small moves matter more than you would think. One organiser charges just £1.50 more at weekends and believes it shifts behaviour. Another has seen conversion move materially on booking-fee changes of 50p to £1. There was also some self-criticism: price often gets pulled simply because it is the easiest lever to reach, rather than because anyone has worked out what the audience values.

Customers buy outcomes. A theatre ticket is not a seat. A conference ticket is not a badge. An exhibition stand is not floor space. People are buying access, status, convenience, networking and ideas.

Discount discipline, and the case for starting low

A recurring confession around the table: our deepest discounts often go to our most loyal customers, the people who were coming anyway. Two-for-ones and aggressive early birds land squarely on the audience least in need of persuasion.

One business has capped all discounting at a hard 20%, with no ticket in the market available for less, and reports it did "an awful lot" for the P&L.

The counterpoint was well made. Rewarding loyalty with the best price can be entirely deliberate. Presale windows and priority booking build an early base of sales, strengthen the relationship and, crucially, take the pressure off. Once that base is in you have room to hold or step prices up. Without it you are staring at the abyss six weeks out, making panicky decisions that erode exhibitor confidence.

Hence Richard's advice for anything new: start lower than feels comfortable and earn the right to step up, rather than launching high to signal quality and then visibly discounting. Marking prices down usually signals the initial price was wrong.

Fear drives a lot of behaviour here. Everyone has had the show that didn't come good, and the memory pushes teams toward reflexive discounting long after the conditions have changed.

Free versus paid

This one came down to the financial model of each event.

Where a show takes several million in stand and sponsorship revenue against a few hundred thousand in tickets, the visitor volume that protects the bigger number matters more than gate income, particularly where visitors behave like trade buyers and spend tens of thousands with exhibitors. In some health-related sectors there are legal reasons to avoid charging altogether, where it can reclassify the organiser as an agent or advertiser of regulated services.

But free has costs. One organiser who stopped issuing comps entirely saw conversion jump from around 30% to 80% with attendance holding steady. The free tickets had been generating administration rather than audience.

Legacy brands can also charge in a way that launches cannot. A new show with no reputation asking people to pay for what is essentially a shopping experience is a very hard sell. Several members described launching free or heavily comped, building the community and the data, monetising the exhibitor side, and only introducing or raising ticket prices once the brand carried weight.

Knowing whether it worked

Attribution is the frustration in all of this. Pricing changes land alongside new competitors, economic headwinds, weather and world events, so it is genuinely hard to know what moved the numbers. One organiser held their pricing through a difficult season on the strength of research showing visitors rated the ticket itself as fair value. The complaints were about parking, food and the total cost of a family day out.

On AI, three practical suggestions came out of the discussion:

• Model willingness to pay using your own CRM and historical performance
• Test acquisition cost at different price points through digital channels, which can be done in a matter of days
• Above all, track rate of sale. Year-on-year pacing by ticket type and package is the most useful signal you have, and exactly the kind of pattern work AI does well

Forecasting stays hard, because live events are so exposed to weather, politics and whatever else lands on the same weekend. As Richard put it, AI lets you process more information before you exercise it.

Add-ons, packages and the parking problem

One major ticketing agent now takes more revenue from add-ons and upselling than from core ticket fees, a shift that dates from Covid. The group saw clear headroom in workshops, tastings, VIP tiers and hospitality. Pay modestly to get in, spend inside. The obstacle is that most ticketing platforms make packaged, multi-element journeys clunky to build and clunky to buy.

Then there is parking, which took up more of the evening than anyone expected. Venue car parking at £25 on top of family tickets is doing real damage to value perception, and in at least one case the car park is not even controlled by the venue.

Ideas on the table:

• Bundle parking into the headline ticket, averaged across all buyers so it reads as included
• Exhibitor-sponsored parking, redeemed on the sponsor's stand. One B2B example has a waiting list of exhibitors happy to pay for 10,000 guaranteed conversations
• The German model, where a show ticket includes city transport

Ticketing platforms and the data question

A long and candid discussion. The general feeling is that consumer exhibitions are underserved. This is the hardest segment of ticketing to build for, with multi-day, multi-ticket, add-on-heavy journeys, and also the lowest-paid, with per-ticket fees a fraction of what concerts and theatre command. That gap goes some way to explaining the underinvestment.

Several members have gone their own way. One rebuilt their journey on e-commerce software after watching thousands of drop-offs in an eight-page checkout. Another uses a rep-based platform where students and micro-influencers sell on commission, with one seller earning £250 in commission on a single show.

The newer platforms drew real interest: slick UX, with a 30-second purchase against two minutes elsewhere, Netflix-style discovery that cross-recommends events to people who already buy them, and self-serve price changes in the back end. The group's collective experience is that the headline appeal comes with strings worth reading carefully. Questions worth asking before signing anything:

• Who owns the customer data, and at what point in the journey is it captured?
• How much control over your digital marketing spend are you handing over?
• What support exists on site on show day?
• Will they work with a partial allocation, or is it all or nothing?
• Where a platform also produces its own experiences, what does sharing your audience data mean when a partner can also become a competitor?

Several members have walked away from otherwise attractive deals after working through exactly those questions. Which raised a bigger thought: could this group jointly specify or commission the ticketing and data platform the sector needs?

Worth noting too, on data. When organisers talk about data we usually mean email addresses. The platforms competing hardest for our business mean behavioural data, lookalike modelling and the ability to find the next 50,000 people who resemble our best customers. That is a different conversation, and one we are not always having.

One for the compliance file

Under the pricing rules in force since April, headline prices must include all mandatory fees. No more £25 plus a £2.50 booking fee, and no splitting a transaction fee across ticket quantities in the display price. Enforcement has reportedly begun.

One member noted the psychological cost: showing the all-in price tips a £29 ticket over the £30 threshold. They have not seen a conversion impact yet, but they are watching.

What we took away:

• Price to change behaviour, as well as fill space
• Cap your discounting, and stop paying people to do what they were going to do anyway
• Build an early base of sales so the six-week-out decisions are made from strength
• Let the financial model of each event decide free versus paid
• Track rate of sale religiously, and use AI to sharpen judgment rather than replace it
• Grow add-on revenue, but fix the buying journey first
• Value is a story you tell long before the checkout page

Thanks to Richard Howle at RH Insights for guiding the conversation, and to Tom and the team at MCM for sponsoring the evening.