Bournemouth Borough Council Microsite

Following the success of ECR’s TicketPoS ticketing solution and less than a year on from the initial go-live, Bournemouth Borough Council are set to go live with further expansions to their e-ticketing offering.

On 17^th February, visitors to Bournemouth’s renowned new Smugglers’s Cove attraction will have a host of new options open to them, being able to make online ticket bookings, pay using their choice of payment type and avoid queues or disappointment at the gate. The system will be immediately put through its paces with roll-out coinciding with school half term holidays when demand is expected to be very high.

Customers benefit from booking options using mobile devices as well as the website, with the available sessions displayed alongside clear pricing. Bournemouth Borough Council required capacity management as a core feature of the new microsite to maximise resource management alongside customer demand. This was vital as Bournemouth are one of the busiest coastal resorts in the UK.

ECR have developed a bespoke microsite generating tickets, managing customer accounts and bookings, and designed specifically to enable the client to manage visitor flow with a comprehensive and user-friendly back office giving full control over all operations, products, pricing and locations. Availability can be managed at the touch of a button inline with resource availability, and can be adjusted accordingly, for example to reflect additional staff.

The customer interface delivers a clear view of available and sold-out time slots, supporting bookings, limitless ticket types, concessions, offers and payments. The company anticipates excellent customer feedback in addition thanks to queue-busting advantages of pre-booked tickets. Once booked, customers can immediately scan to enter. The TicketPoS system also prevents ticket fraud with dynamic QR codes and instant validation.

Head office staff have control over every aspect of on-the-ground operations, with real-time data and access to ticket management, availability and validations, together with GPS mapping showing activity in real time. Hot spot mapping can be used to redeploy staff to busier areas and to monitor entry/exit wherever tickets are scanned using the fully mobile all-in-one Go2 handheld terminals.

Throughout development and testing, reports have shown the system to be highly intuitive with a clear and quick bookings & payment process. Back office users benefit from managed bookings reducing manual input and increasing efficiency. And as an added benefit, Bournemouth also have visibility over pre-booked tickets and projected demands on capacity well in advance of peak times and dates.

The microsite and online bookings solution complements TicketPoS for Bournemouth Borough Council, managing sales across multiple seafront operations, including the land trains, sun lounger rentals and car parking. A fully scalable solution, TicketPoS and ECR present clients such as Bournemouth with the ability to add on functionality as requirements grow.

To date ECR have deployed the cloud-based TicketPoS system in 21 countries worldwide with over 7000 mobile terminals in live operation at the time of writing.