Online Travel Agencies to Tap Ticketmaster to Sell Live Events
U.S. ticketing giant Ticketmaster has cut a deal with activities tech vendor Redeam to distribute live event tickets to travel resellers.
“We’re actively working with initial data clients to try to roll out in given markets,” said Dan Armstrong, Ticketmaster executive vice president of distributed commerce. “We’ve already done some rollouts in Las Vegas, and we expect to be expanding to many more clients in the U.S. as well as internationally throughout 2022.”
Ticketmaster — a subsidiary of concert giant Live Nation Entertainment — estimates that 142 million people traveled more than two hours to attend ticketed events in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
“That demonstrates that there’s a connection between live events and planning a trip,” Armstrong said. “We recognize that not all customers are going to come to Ticketmaster when they’re booking travel.”
For online reselling, Ticketmaster lets event organizers it works with, such as its sister brand Live Nation, set the pricing that resellers must use.
“An event organizer, say for the band Bad Bunny, could essentially allocate tickets that would be made available to travel providers through the technology fo our open transactional APIs [application programming interfaces] to Redeam, which plugs us into these third-party resellers,” Armstrong said.
Redeam’s partners include TripAdvisor’s Viator, Expedia, TUI Musement, and GetYourGuide. Companies need to make technical connections and sign commercial terms before the online travel agencies add Ticketmaster’s concerts, sports events, and live theater performances to their other tours, activities, and experiences inventory.
“Redeam and other players potentially offer the ability to tap into pre-existing distribution pipes into these travel players that historically haven’t been well-positioned to activate live event inventory in the way they do tours and attractions,” Armstrong said. “Much of what we do in distribution is direct into resellers, but this is a scalable way to enter the travel ecosystem.”
All involved companies see sales to live events as just the ticket for juicing growth post-pandemic. Live Nation generated $11.5 billion in revenue in 2019, partly from selling 38 million tickets.
“This relationship proves our market strength and brings a huge audience to all our distribution partners as well as to our operator customers,” said Melanie Meador, president and CEO of Redeam, which was one of Skift’s Top Travel Startups to Watch 2018.
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