- The Guardian,
- Wednesday December 1, 2004
Theatre-goers booking seats to The History Boys, this winter's hit at the National Theatre in London, are taking part in a public sector e-commerce success story. The state-owned theatre complex now collects half its ticket revenue over the web.
In the neighbouring capital city to the north, the organisers of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe claim their own web breakthrough: 43% of ticket sales this year were on the web. The new enthusiasm for e-booking suggests opportunities for tie-ups with local authority websites.
The National Theatre runs its entire service in-house, in a small computer room next door to its ticket sales call centre. "The overriding priority is not to sell the same ticket twice, so call centre and website have to work from the same ticketing system," says Peter Talbot, IT director.
Combining the two involved integrating different generations of technology. The proprietary booking system runs on the VMS system while the website is Linux. Messages between the two are coded in Edifact, the original e-commerce data standard.
"NT traffic is very peaky, most of the time we're never near capacity but when we open booking on a new booking period, it takes off." On day one of booking for Alan Bennett's The History Boys, the box office took £270,000. The first couple of hours was "a bit too busy", says Talbot.
A load-balancing box, Coyote Equaliser, manages the transaction traffic. "It hasn't gone down since we put the equaliser in," says Talbot.
The website is based on a content-management system, so the theatre's marketing staff can enter information about new productions without worrying about formatting.
There are no plans to outsource the service. "A couple of years ago we had a proposal for outsourcing, which would have cost about £1m," says Talbot. At the moment, the IT budget is "five figures rather than six".
An obvious drawback of doing everything on-site is vulnerability. Talbot's disaster recovery plan involves storing backups on another National Theatre site. However, any disaster hitting the IT operation would probably also affect performances: the main contingency plan is to ensure that enough phones are available to call ticket-holders to tell them that the performance has been cancelled.
Talbot, a former NHS IT manager, says he enjoys the theatre: "People here know how to manage projects - they understand the concept of a deadline."
The Edinburgh Festival has even more extreme peaks of demand. Last year's festival sold 1.2m tickets, with a value of almost £10m, online. Some 62% of fringe tickets sold the first day were through the website. Numbers of unique visitors to the site were 72% up on 2003. The site is hosted by an Edinburgh company.
Surprisingly few local authorities offer e-booking of local theatres and concert halls from their websites. Talbot says he is open for suggestions for linking the National Theatre website with London portals. One idea is to create city breaks around theatre bookings: visitors would book a performance, then go on to make travel, hotel and meal reservations from the same site. And perhaps pay their congestion charge while they're at it.
