I took my daughter to see Taylor Swift in concert last year in Atlanta. And just before the show, for maybe one or two minutes, I thought I had accidentally deleted the tickets from my Apple Wallet. Disaster! Emergency! Were they still in my email? Could I still pull them up? What’s my back-up plan?! The rather shady re-sellers outside the stadium?
Thankfully, my then-18-year-old calmly took my smartphone and helped Dumb Ol’ Dad bring the tickets up for display. Taylor was fantastic, much merch was purchased, and I was a hero again for … well, a day or two. But, yes, it was an emergency in the moment. A near-disaster. I should have been better prepared. I should have had an immediate back-up plan.
Now, imagine you are a venue operator or ticketing or box office manager, and you and your staff run into a real-life crisis event — one that threatens a major performance or game or other live event that you’re hosting and are responsible for. What do you do? What’s your plan? How will the show go on?
In part one of this two-part series, we talk to three INTIX members who have been through such emergencies and lived to tell the tale. In next week’s part two, we will preview a workshop coming up at INTIX 2025 in New York that focuses on emergency preparedness.
But first, let the battle-hardened professionals speak:
David Winn, Box Office Manager for the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Associate Director of Tanglewood Ticketing
David Winn
On July 19, 2024, American cybersecurity company CrowdStrike distributed a faulty update to its Falcon Sensor security software that caused widespread problems with computers running the Microsoft Windows software. Consequently, around 8.5 million systems crashed and were not able to properly restart.
The incident is roundly considered to be the biggest outage in the history of information technology, disrupting daily life, commerce and governments around the globe. Everything from air travel and banks to stock markets and government services were impacted, and the worldwide financial damage has been estimated to be at least $10 billion.
Live events were affected, too, including two shows that Winn and his staff were ticketing that evening. He recalls, “July 19 started as a lovely day. I remember waking up and listening to the radio and hearing about this incident that was going on. And I thought, ‘Hmmm, well, that’s going to suck.’ About an hour later, I got to work and realized just how badly it was going to suck! [Ticketing software provider] their Tessitura instance was completely shut down by this. At 8 in the morning, we had no ticketing system. We had no way to get authorizations for credit cards. That being a Friday, we indeed had a concert that evening and one general admission (GA) show that afternoon. The GA event was easy. We just looked and saw how many empty seats there were, and we said, ‘Cash only or write a check.’”
But the evening concert? That was where all concerned earned their pay that day. Winn and his colleagues remembered there were several sections that were completely empty for the evening performance: “We thought, ‘That’s great. We can sell a general admission ticket to that section for a discounted rate. And if someone shows up with a ticket [to that section], we’ll just ask the people to move to the more general seating.’”
One piece of advice Winn has for anyone reading this who might be in the same predicament one day? Make sure you hold on to your rolls of physical tickets! His venue ended up using tickets with different colors to differentiate the different seating purchases — one color for inside seats, another for the GA sections, another for lawn tickets and so forth.
He recalled, “Our big issue was taking credit cards. What we finally realized was that in our store and in our food service, they were still able to take credit cards because they didn’t go through the ticketing system. So, we got machines from the stores and used those at the windows. … We ended up having four credit card machines going around the property. People were buying general admission tickets. The house manager and his staff were really amazing because they kept everybody happy. And I still can’t believe what my staff did that day to appease every person who walked up. Every one of them turned into comedians! It was hysterical. The staff made light of the situation and made everyone feel at ease. We sold between 1,200 and 1,300 tickets that night!”
A debriefing followed the next morning. From that review, some decisions were made. The biggest? “Every night now, we have the ticketing system run a map and all of the reports that we need for the next day’s events. It’s saved to a file — not a Microsoft Word or Tessitura file — and emailed to our work and emailed to our home. So, if something happens, we now at least know we can go back to the day before. We can start with the exact information that we had the day before. I can, for example, pull up the seating map from the day before and look at it on my phone.”
Amy Botwright, Ticketing Manager for Kutztown University Athletics in Pennsylvania
Football is practically a religion in Pennsylvania. Whether it’s the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Penn State Nittany Lions or any number of Pop Warner kids’ teams in the smallest of towns, life stops when the pigskin is being slung around the gridiron anywhere in the Keystone State.
So, it is with Kutztown University. Which made a recent emergency that happened on game night all the more dire. Botwright recalls, “It was a situation of ‘that which can go wrong will go wrong!’ Due to not having Wi-Fi at our football stadium, we rely on Wi-Fi hot spots. Though we tested them the day before, when it came time to set up for the game, they were not functioning. This meant we couldn’t access the ticketing system, sell or scan tickets. I carried a laptop and ticket printer to a nearby building to pre-print tickets. Of course, the ticket printer had an error and kept jamming. I was able to contact a colleague to bring another printer from our office across campus.”
Eventually, Botwright had the necessary tickets printed and was able to get back to the stadium in time for the booths to open. But disaster struck again. “It was then the issue of the scanners not having Wi-Fi needed to be addressed,” she says. “I told the staff to just pretend to scan. They did, and one even included vocal beeps as people entered the stadium!”
Botwright said the key to getting through that evening was focusing on one issue at a time and quickly assessing what can be addressed and what can’t. “I train my staff with the idea that things will go wrong, so we will need to problem-solve,” she says. “My staff trusted my directions and asked questions so that they understood the whys. Particularly when they were told to fake scan, I explained that we didn’t want it to be obvious that we couldn’t track admissions otherwise no one would buy tickets.”
And changes that have since been implemented? Botwright echoed Winn’s take from earlier: “One thing I have done to help in the future is replenishing my full set of pre-printed [general admission] tickets. We used the set we had for basketball two years ago and hadn’t replaced them.”
But, of course, there are those times where no matter what steps you take or response measures you try, the event still has to be cancelled. What is the game plan then? “Luckily, we have had few events cancelled,” Botwright replies. “When we do, I make sure we have the refund policies detailed before we contact everyone. With rare exceptions, the first question will always be ‘When/how am I getting my refund?’ If we don’t have that answer, it makes for unpleasant interactions for the staff in addition to needing multiple communications.”
Justin Foo, Associate Director, Sales & Customer Engagement for the Los Angeles Philharmonic
Justin Foo
With global warming, we need more songs about heat. Where are the lyricists writing verses like “Hot town, summer in the city. Back of my neck gettin’ dark and gritty?” Or “It’s too hot, too hot, lady. Gotta run for shelter, gotta run for shade.”
You’ll recall back in early September, Los Angeles endured a tremendous heatwave. And Foo and his staff couldn’t run for shelter or shade when the neighborhood surrounding the Hollywood Bowl experienced a power outage about 15 minutes before gates were scheduled to open for a concert. Foo recalls, “The power outage impacted the entire venue. Audiences had already started to arrive prior to the power outage and continued to arrive.”
During this time, the Hollywood Bowl’s management was getting conflicting feedback from the Department of Water and Power (DWP) about when power would be restored. Foo says, “As we held gates, we communicated to patrons on-site why gates hadn’t been opened. We have multiple picnic areas outside of the gates, so some patrons opted to begin picnicking while they waited.”
The key to moving forward was to stay in contact with DWP, while constantly assessing and reassessing the situation and devising multiple contingency plans in the event that power wasn’t restored in time to allow guests in for the start of the show. “We looked at presenting the concert with a delayed start time, presenting a truncated version of the concert with a delayed start time, and postponing or canceling the concert,” Foo says. “While we waited for updates, we drafted verbiage for all of our communication channels for each scenario and stood by.”
Fortunately, the Hollywood Bowl had previously created templates for concert postponement/cancellation/update communications, so Foo and crew were able to quickly and easily draft this messaging by using those templates as a basis. “We simply had to update concert details and the reason for postponement. Having the preapproved concert update communication templates helped us move quickly as it reduced edits and needs for cumbersome routing for approval.”
As the power outage continued and DWP was unable to provide an estimate of when power would be restored, the decision was made to postpone the concert with a new date to be announced. As soon as this decision was made, all concerned sprang into action and deployed messaging on-site verbally and by posting signage. Foo adds, “We deployed direct messages to ticket purchasers and holders via email, SMS and voice messaging. We also posted updates on our social channels [and] updated our digital tickets to indicate that concert was postponed.”
The LA Philharmonic had a few concert postponements in recent years. Foo says, “One item that we have changed is creating a dedicated communication channel to communicate when situations like this happen. This postponement happened over the weekend, so some of our marketing and comms staff weren’t in the office. Because of this, some conversations started in different channels — text messaging to individuals who weren’t in the office, different email threads, Slack. What we found is because of the delay in email delivery, responses were staggered and often weren’t responding to the most up-to-date information as messages were being sent rapidly. Since this power outage, we’ve set up a ticketing and marketing disaster recovery Slack channel to centralize all communications in these situations and ensure that all messages are being sent/received in real time.”
For anyone reading this who might be concerned a similar emergency situation might develop on their watch, Foo was quick to offer advice. His main piece of counsel? Leave room for the unexpected! “No matter how many scenarios you think of, eventually something is going to come up that you haven’t thought of. Last year, we had to postpone a concert due to the threat of a hurricane in LA. While living in Louisiana for five years, I definitely had plans in the event that we were under a hurricane watch. It had never crossed my mind that this could ever be a possibility in Los Angeles!”
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