Welcome to Umi + Tickitto!
Tickitto are exactly the right type of travel tech business the world needs right now.
They have put their blood, sweat and tears into connecting global ticket supply with the previously un-connectable event management systems and now provide a fast, secure and developer-friendly platform for us travel tech innovators to build with.
At Umi, we are super excited to announce a partnership with Tickitto which will bring the power of fully connected ticket sales to thousands of independent operators to facilitate ancillary revenue and fuel a better guest experience.
What is Tickitto?
Tickitto is a one-stop shop for connectivity to a world of events and tickets. From premier league football stadiums, to Wimbledon to the West End, they have completed a full integration with leading event management platforms to bring the whole hospitality industry the exciting opportunity to distribute and monetise all the amazing experiences that are happening around their property. You know that large rack of brochures in a hotel lobby? Think of that but version 2.0. You can discover, purchase and receive your tickets seamlessly from within the hotel booking experience.
While this has the advantage of digitizing the brochure-rack experience in the hotel, it’s much more than that – it means the customer can plan their trips ahead if they want, as well as taking advantage of any last-minute options or deals when they check-in. And each engagement enriches the experience for them and the relationship they have with the hotel.
Currently the target audience for their innovative solution is enterprise and large corporates with the aim of and providing deep connectivity within existing systems at scale. This makes complete sense from a business standpoint. It minimises the number of variations in use cases and allows the Tickitto development team to fully invest in the underlying API.
While the Tickitto team focuses on this, we believe there is a massive opportunity to get this tech into the hands of independent operators to enhance their product offering.
How are we working together?
The first stage of our partnership has been to create a WordPress plugin that brings the full functionality of the Tickitto API to any WordPress website allowing fully branded events modules from within the hotel website. We know that a significant proportion of hospitality websites are built using WordPress so it’s a great first step when increasing the adoption of this technology. The WordPress plugin allows operators to:
- Choose the country, city and category of event types they wish to show
- Input their Tickitto API key in order to be automatically paid any commission due
- Select themes and styling options to ensure it is fully customised to their brand
- Override any styling with custom CSS to perfectly match the website
How do hotels and operators benefit?
For most hotels that are not complete destination hotels (such as The Gleneagles Hotel), the objective is about empowering the guest to have an amazing experience both in and out of the hotel.
Tickitto will allow operators to select the tickets they wish to promote and earn commission from any sales made. This differs significantly from platforms like Funzing which take the guest/customer away into a totally separate platform. This loses flow as well as not being able to learn from the user experience of the guest.
Tickitto will allow operators to offer tours and experiences from within their own booking journey, adding the benefit of owning the customer experience and data that is generated alongside it.
The commission that is generated from each ticket sale will be between 5-15% and automatically paid out to the partner using Stripe as a payment gateway. Tickitto will remain the merchant of record so you never need to worry about processing payments, refunds or anything else.
Research shows that post-purchase CRM is incredibly effective at upselling and we see this revenue excelling via this channel so we advise bringing that into your pre-stay marketing activities.
In Summary
We are really excited about building this into our offering at Umi. The importance of diversifying revenue streams was thrown into sharp focus throughout the pandemic and we have now created the user flow that perfectly blends hand-picked recommended events and rewarding levels of commission, all the while staying in the hotel’s booking journey.