Based on the analysis of over 400 festivals supported by Weezevent across Europe, we’ve identified 10 key strategies that organisers can start applying right away to boost their performance. These insights, shared by Grégor Einis, Head of Sales at Weezevent, during his talk at the MaMA Festival & Convention, show how connected ticketing, accreditation management, cashless systems, and new forms of audience engagement can become powerful tools to improve efficiency and elevate the festival experience.
Summary
1. Connect ticketing and marketing to boost your sales
By 2030, the global ticketing market is expected to reach $61.8 billion, according to For Insights Consultancy, highlighting its growing strategic importance for organisers. In 2025, ticketing is no longer just about selling tickets; it has become a genuine marketing and relationship-building tool. Yet few festivals have a fully connected ecosystem. Most still juggle multiple unsynchronised tools, from email to advertising platforms, making targeting and data centralisation more complex and requiring time-consuming manual imports and exports.
This is where Gigz, which has just joined the Weezevent family, brings real innovation. By centralising ticketing and marketing data within a single tool, organisers can segment their audiences, launch targeted multichannel campaigns, and measure both sales and return on investment.
The integration between WeezTicket and Gigz ensures smooth data synchronisation without any complex setup. From a single interface, teams can easily create and manage email, SMS, WhatsApp, or Meta Ads campaigns while tracking their performance in real time.
To take full advantage of these features, contact the Gigz team for a personalised demo and a complete introduction to the solution.
2. Facilitate ticket purchases with instalment payments
In the UK, this practice has become the norm, with nearly 70% of ticket purchases made in three or more instalments. This shift isn’t just an economic trend; it’s a real driver of accessibility and inclusion.
Behind this habit lies a broader reflection on how to make culture more accessible. For a festival, offering split payments (for example: ticket, camping, or additional services) helps create a smoother purchasing experience while opening the event to a broader audience.
This approach, already well established in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, could become a genuine competitive advantage for organisers by 2026.
Want to offer instalment payments? Let’s talk!
3. Extend the relationship with your audience through the buyer space
The experience no longer ends after the ticket purchase. More and more organisers are rethinking their relationship with audiences after the sale by introducing a buyer space accessible directly from the confirmation e-mail.
This personalised area allows festival-goers to download their tickets, but, more importantly, to add complementary services. The goal is twofold: to increase the average order value and to extend the relationship between the festival and its audience even before the gates open.
By adopting this approach of gradually enriching the offer, organisers turn a simple transaction into a richer, more personalised customer journey, one where every interaction strengthens participant engagement and boosts overall revenue.
4. Manage resale smartly to avoid selling against yourself
Managed ticket resale has become a key issue in the festival ecosystem. While it helps prevent frustration when tickets sell out, it needs to be carefully designed to protect both audiences and organisers.
In France, at Hellfest, this practice is already well controlled: resale only opens once a ticket category has sold out and never runs alongside the main ticketing phase. This approach prevents the secondary market from competing with the primary one, as opening resale too early risks undermining your own sales model.
Weezevent offers a balanced approach to price evolution. This model ensures pricing consistency, strengthens audience trust, and protects festival profitability. Far from being just an additional service, managed resale becomes a genuine commercial strategy tool and a key part of the buyer experience.
5. Centralise access to simplify the festival journey
Inspired by air travel, the boarding pass is making its way into the world of festivals. This system brings together all participant rights, such as the ticket, camping and additional services, into a single QR code.
The goal is simple: to streamline access and enhance the digital experience for attendees. By replacing multiple documents or QR codes with one digital pass, organisers can reduce queues and minimise scanning errors.
For festivals, this format is much more than a time saver; it becomes a strategic communication tool, enabling targeted messages to be shared before and during the event, and even allowing for sponsored activations. The boarding pass can also be integrated directly into the festival’s app, encouraging downloads and further centralising the participant experience.
This system stands out as an innovation at the crossroads of technology and audience experience, designed for generations used to managing everything from their smartphones.
6. Rethink access control to create a seamless experience
Long seen as a simple logistical step, access control has now become a true driver of experience and operational efficiency. At Weezevent, this crucial phase is treated as a project in its own right, carefully prepared in advance with a clear strategy, tailored tools and precise performance indicators.
Every event comes with its own set of constraints such as staggered openings and multiple capacities, and therefore requires a bespoke configuration. Increasingly, organisers are adopting a data-driven approach, analysing entry times, zone-by-zone flow and scan anomalies to optimise the festival-goer journey. Understanding errors has become just as important as managing flows, as it allows real-time adjustments and the elimination of friction points.
Thanks to features such as displaying personalised information at scan (holder photo, accreditation type, specific alerts), automatic updates of control lists based on predefined time rules, and centralised error reporting, on-site teams gain both autonomy and responsiveness. No more manual intervention, everything updates continuously.
A well-designed access control system means fewer queues, greater security, and, above all, a positive first impression for every participant from the moment they arrive on site.
7. Manage accreditations efficiently at scale
Another best practice observed is large-scale accreditation management. The Montreux Jazz Festival perfectly illustrates what the WeezCrew solution can achieve when deployed at a major event.
With several thousand volunteers, service providers, technicians and partners to coordinate, the challenge is immense. Thanks to WeezCrew, each profile is automatically directed to the right department. Managers can then approve, reject or comment on each request and monitor staff allocation in real time.
In addition, access control makes it possible to record entries and exits, enabling accurate tracking of attendance times. Working hours can be automatically calculated and exported to HR software, ensuring smoother and more centralised management.
Beyond logistics, this tool also helps strengthen the sense of belonging and build a true volunteer community around the event.
8. Enhancing comfort for festivalgoers with smart lockers
In the Netherlands, Paaspop Festival installed over 12,000 connected lockers, a simple yet powerful innovation that perfectly illustrates how technology can elevate the festival experience while unlocking new revenue streams.
These lockers, available on site, allow attendees to drop off and collect their belongings completely autonomously. No more queues, no more wasted time, everything is managed in self-service mode, from payment to locker access.
For organisers, the benefit is twofold: offering a smooth, practical experience for attendees while boosting revenue, with some events generating over €100,000 from this feature alone. Smart lockers have become an essential part of the overall experience: more comfort for festivalgoers, more control and profitability for organisers.
9. Automate eco-cup management for smoother operations
In Belgium and the Netherlands, legislation now bans the use of single-use cups, pushing organisers to rethink logistics around eco cups. Some festivals, such as Tomorrowland, have taken an innovative approach by connecting cups directly to the festival goers’ payment system.
In practice, each cup is fitted with an NFC chip that activates when a drink is purchased. Once finished, the participant drops the cup into a connected collection point, which automatically identifies the user and triggers an instant refund. This allows the point of sale to focus on its primary function, selling, while the entire refund process runs automatically.
This model offers a dual benefit:
- it reduces congestion at the bars by clearly separating sales and collection points,
- it simplifies the event’s environmental management, resulting in a cleaner site and automated sorting.
This system demonstrates how technology can address both ecological and operational challenges while improving transparency and audience satisfaction.
Discover how our cup management solution, developed in collaboration with Auxcis, enhances the spectator experience and stadium operations at Royal Antwerp FC.
10. Turn leftover cashless credit into a new revenue stream
Across the European festival sector, there are around 53.6 million attendees across approximately 2,300 festivals, with 72% already adopting cashless systems and an annual growth rate of around 6.2% (Industry Research). After each festival, unused cashless credits often remain on participants’ accounts, as is the case at Rock en Seine.
Rather than simply refunding these amounts, some festivals now turn them into an engagement opportunity. Before the refund phase, a dedicated shop invites festival goers to spend their remaining balance on merchandise, make a donation, or even secure early access to next year’s presale. The aim isn’t to push for additional purchases but to offer one last chance to extend the festival experience.
This approach transforms an administrative process into a moment of interaction, resulting not only in increased revenue but also in stronger engagement among the most loyal audiences.
11. Reduce your environmental impact with recyclable cards
As part of its ongoing sustainability commitments, Weezevent has introduced fully recyclable cashless cards. Made from reusable materials and printed with silver-based ink, they can be safely disposed of in recycling bins without harming the environment.
This shift, already adopted by several events in France and Switzerland, is part of a broader effort to reduce the sector’s carbon footprint while maintaining high technological standards. A simple yet meaningful innovation that proves ecology and performance can go hand in hand.
From event CRM to buyer spaces and smart cups, all these best practices from across Europe reflect one shared belief: the future of festivals lies in data and experience. Weezevent is fully aligned with this vision, supporting organisers in building models that are not only more efficient but also more sustainable.
