Behind the tunnel ticketing frenzy

Kiwi ticketing firm iTICKET was chosen over other multinationals to ticket the huge Waterview Tunnel opening events last month. Collaboration with a Danish tech company helped make it a success.

When Well-Connected Alliance, the organisation behind the new Waterview Connection Project, were looking for how to handle the tens of thousands of visitors keen to walk and bike through the brand new Waterview tunnel before it opened to cars, they were faced with an unusual challenge.  How best to organise a complex ticketing process for 67,500 free tickets, with a top secret go-live date and huge media interest?

With no way of knowing the volumes that would be placed on their ticketing platform, iTICKET CEO Reece Preston says Danish technology played a part in ensuring the success of the project.  
Preston explains, “We anticipated big numbers, and knew that our lead time to get this right could potentially be very short. I attended a ticketing conference last year in Ireland where I connected with some innovators in our industry. One of the people I met was the head of Queue-it, a company in Denmark who are doing great things with queuing software.”  

iTICKET implemented Queue-it’s technology into their booking system as a safety net to manage web traffic for the tunnel opening events.

“We were excited to partner with iTICKET to expand our service to New Zealand and provide purchasers there with the smoothest experience possible when so many are seeking tickets. By applying our online queue system to the release of the tunnel tickets, iTICKET ensured a fair and informed experience for those pursuing tickets, and of course kept their systems online so that all of the tickets could be claimed without complication in less than a day” says Queue-it CE Niels Henrik Sodemann.

Preston adds “We already use dynamic scaling for handling large volumes on our site, but the Danish queuing software streamlined bookings during extreme traffic peaks – like the huge spikes we saw after tunnel announcements on the 6 o’clock news – and meant that no matter how many people visited the site, there was no chance of it crashing.”

iTICKET created a separate website www.tunnelopening.co.nz for the Waterview events, to enable a customised one-page booking experience.  “The ticketing requirements of this project were incredibly detailed, very specific and due to the profile of the event, highly confidential.  We knew that the demand for tickets would exceed the number on offer, so wanted to make sure that until tickets had “sold out”, bookings happened as quickly and as fairly as possible”, says Preston.