E-COMMERCE TICKETING TOOL FOR MULTIFUNCTIONAL
ENCLOSURES
Low cost solutions for tradicional venues best adventaje
Ricardo Colomo, Ángel García
Department of Computing, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Edmundo Tovar
Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Keywords: e-Commerce & e-business: B2B & B2C, CRM, Internet Services & Applications, Ticketing.
Abstract: The explosion of Internet has made consumers much more familiar with new ways to shop. Sellers can
distribute their products and accept orders from buyers 24 hours a day. The field of e-Ticketing constitutes
one of the mightier lines of business in e-commerce. Traditional enclosures, like bullrings, have a vital
importance in the circuits of leisure of many places of Europe, but they count on the disadvantage of the
obsolescence in its systems and procedures. This paper describes the initiative carried out in Spain, which
allows the companies that manage traditional enclosures to sell tickets through the Internet without making
big payments in order to reach new channels and to improve the operation and yield of the present ones.
1 INTRODUCTION
Civilizations traditionally have constructed
enclosures destined for leisure. The advantage and
yield of this kind of constructions are often far from
being optimal for structural or technical reasons,
although the demand of the use of traditional
enclosures, either for traditional celebrations or for
new ways of leisure, is increasing. In Spain, due to
the ancestral bullfighting tradition, all chief towns
and many country villages have, at least, a bullring
properly prepared, having a minimum of 7,000 seats
and surpassing 24,000 in Madrid. Bullring property
is, generally, public. Administration establishes the
operation way, almost always in the hands of
particular promoters in concession regime. Due to
the extensive influence of Spanish culture in Latin
America, bullfighting tradition, and for that reason,
bullrings are also frequent in other countries like
Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador or Mexico. Portugal
and southern France counts, also, with a set of
bullrings, in some cases put on Roman circuses.
Outside bullfighting season, which depends on
the importance of the city and the local fiesta, the
availability of the facilities are total. Event types
range from concerts, fairs, promotional events, to
sport events. Due to the lack of big tennis venues,
Spanish tennis dignitaries have chosen bullrings to
hold Davis Cup semi finals in 2003 and 2004.
Having this opportunity of business in account,
we started up an initiative in 2003 to facilitate new
technologies to this kind of venues. In order to offer
a total cover of ticketing needs, we have designed a
B2B-B2C tool and a set of services associated to it
that enables the promoters to negotiate seat sales on
a remote and flexible way taking advantage of
Internet, mobility and CRM.
The reminder of this paper is arranged as
follows. Section 2 sets up ticketing, and in particular
e-ticketing, state-of-the-art. Section 3 presents a
functional description of the tool. Section 4 sets up
tool architecture. Section 5 lists all bullrings that
have contracted the service during 2004 and, finally,
section 6 summarizes concluding remarks and future
lines of development and investigation.
181
Colomo R., García Á. and Tovar E. (2005).
E-COMMERCE TICKETING TOOL FOR MULTIFUNCTIONAL ENCLOSURES - Low cost solutions for tradicional venues best adventaje.
In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on e-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 181-184
DOI: 10.5220/0001408701810184
Copyright
c
SciTePress
2 E-TICKETING
E-commerce systems have been changing the
tradition of business activities through the Internet
E-Ticketing is one of the most lucrative business
activities in this field. Particularly significant is
Airlines e-ticketing. Starting from the early-1980s,
the computer reservation system has played a very
important role in the provision of airline services.
The industry has been effectively encouraged by
both the demand-side and supply side factors within
a very short time. Web reservations, on-line
ticketing, electronic tickets and kiosks have
appeared soon [Shon 2003]. Throughout 1999, 2000
and 2001, the booming e-commerce business
generated lots of investment in setting up virtual
ticketing websites around the world. Airlines
recognize that the key to survival is cutting costs,
and they are looking to technology to do just that
[Riebeek2003].
Apart from transportation initiatives, leisure
related fields are one of the most productive
implementations in e-ticketing. Cinemas, theatres,
sports and music are extraordinarily developed fields
in e-CRM. It enables companies of all sizes and
across all industries to offer one-to-one relationships
to customers [Pan 2003]. At this moment, all great
sport spectacles count on an e-ticketing system
(www.nba.com, fifaworldcup.yahoo.com, etc).
Figure 1: Homepage local Information System
The importance of this kind of applications
explains the existence of studies applying Software
Engineering principles in e-Ticketing. In particular
[Li 2001] discusses the use of the Unified Modelling
Language (UML) to analyze and design e-commerce
systems.
This paper describes an initiative that enables
traditional enclosures (bullrings) promoters to hire
an e-ticketing tool to sell tickets through the Internet
without making big payments.
3 E-COMMERCE SOLUTION
The most important for spectacles celebrated in
traditional enclosures are tickets reservation and
expedition. This expedition can be made using the
conventional way, through a ticket wholesaler or
from promoter web page, which is offered as an
additional feature. Operations are as follows:
Bullring offices. Clerks, using the Internet http
tool that is showed in figure 1, select the seats and
prints it though a common laser or a thermic printer.
Payments can be cash or credit card.
Ticket wholesaler. Wholesalers
(www.ticketstoros.com, www.mundotoro.com,
www.arrimate.net …) can use either a request to a
web-service (under development) or a conventional
XML/HTML requests, to look up the availability of
seats, and, once chosen the desired seat or seats,
depending on the event, either print the tickets using
their means, or, offer a code to the client. This code,
in combination with Personal Identity Card, is the
key for physical tickets needed for area entrance.
Wholesalers offer their services via phone, Internet,
and given the diffusion of the devices like PDA or
Mobile Phones, through mobile devices (fulfilling
[Met 2003] dictations). Wholesalers are responsible
of making collections and payments.
Figure 2: Flash visual improvement
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182
Promoter Web. Web uses the same technology
showed in the previous option. Once chosen the
localities by the user, they are paid using a safe
payment gateway provided by Banesto [Banesto
2004]. Once successfully concluded the payment
process, web facilitates an identifier to the user
which is the key for printed tickets.
Figure 3: Ticket tool selection
Events, from ticketing point of view, can be divided
into numbered and not numbered. Numbered events
are those in which the user must occupy a concrete
seat. To guarantee the suitability of the location,
application must codify each seat topology. This
circumstance makes necessary the use of a “seat
placer” that handles the exact codification of the
different seats, in order to reduce start time of new
customers.
In order to offer a friendly interface to the
reservation and purchase process, figure 2 shows a
visual improvement. One possibility of future
improvement is the implantation of visual
improvements that allow, not only the survey control
of the seats and of their zones, but an experiential
purchase through devices as guided visits, subjective
views from the seats and 3D animations. Taking like
reference mentioned figure 2, the user receives the
necessary information that allows him/her to decide
what zone of the enclosure wants to occupy based on
its price, proximity to the spectacle or type of seat.
Seats election is made by means of a simple set of
screens that reproduce layout of the enclosure.
Trough an intuitive set of icons, user can choose
available seats. Figure 3 shows the selection process.
Countable operations and exhaustive collections
inspection are also available. These features allow
identifying possible irregularities either in the
interaction with wholesalers or in internal
operations. This simple set of functionalities allows
the promoters to organize and trade all kind of
events, through a no risk business model based on
the income sharing. Tool features make possible
bullrings activities internationalisation, tickets
expedition schedules relaxation and the access to the
ticketing wholesalers in a trustworthy way.
4 ARCHITECTURE
XML Web services are the fundamental building
blocks in the movement to distributed computing on
the Internet. Open standards and the focus on
communication and collaboration among
people
Figure 4: Application Architecture
E-COMMERCE TICKETING TOOL FOR MULTIFUNCTIONAL ENCLOSURES - Low cost solutions for tradicional
venues best adventaje
183
and applications have created an environment where
XML Web services are becoming the platform for
application integration. Our XML Web Service (in
progress) showed in Figure 4 uses standards as
Standard Web protocol (SOAP), Web Services
Description Language (WSDL) document and
Universal Discovery Description and Integration:
UDDI.
Application is based Microsoft Windows 2000
Server and Internet Information Service. Web
Services are under development, and it’s scheduled
to become fully functional in June 2005 together
with Microsoft Windows 2003 migration.
Hypermedia pages are dynamically built using
Active Server Pages (ASP) based on the request of
clients. Migration to ASP.net technology is also
scheduled in May 2005. Microsoft SQL Server
stores all information behind web server. Database
structure counts on a total of 37 tables, 13 views and
more than 120 associated objects.
5 CUSTOMERS
Figure 5: Customer Map in 2004
Valencia bullring, our first customer, celebrates
more than forty bullfighting shows and other twenty
additional events (motocross, concerts...). Selling
more than 450,000 tickets in Valencia means a
technical challenge that forced us to the creation of a
set of norms and procedures that have been proved
in the installation of the remaining enclosures (see
Figure 4).
2005 Forecasts are very favourable too. 2005-
2006 biennium expansion plan includes contracts
with a maximum of 18 promoters, ranging about
165,000 seats, and more than a million tickets
expenditures in 2006. This expansion plan for 2005
includes six new customers, duplicating 2004
enterprise clients.
6 CONCLUDING REMARKS
E-Commerce tool together with no-risk business
model based on revenue sharing, have supposed a
success guarantee of the initiatives presented in this
paper. The introduction of shared technologies in
companies with average invoicing supposes a costs
cutting and an unquestionable improvement in the
service, which, in addition attracts more public to
bullrings.
Future developments will be focused in the
improvement and generalization of web service use
by all system parts, the introduction of experiential
elements in the purchase of seats (guided visits, 3D
animations, etc) and the adoption of accessibility
standards in order to guarantee access to all type of
users and platforms.
Expansion reached in bullfighting scope can
serve as springboard for the access other to
traditional enclosures, like frontons or greyhound
tracks. Within bullfighting scope,
internationalisation activities include Southern
France, Portugal, and, of course, due to market size,
Latin-America.
REFERENCES
Banesto (2005) [ONLINE] http://www.banesto.es/
Li, X., Liu, Z. & Guo,Z. (2001). Formal Object-Oriented
Analysis and Design of an Online Ticketing System.
In (APSEC'01) 8th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering
Conference.
MeT (2003) White paper on Mobile Ticketing. [ONLINE]
http://www.mobiletransaction.org/
Pan, S.L. & Lee, J. (2003).Using e-CRM for a unified
view of the customer. Communications of the ACM
April 2003/Vol.46,No.4. pp 95-99
Riebeek, H. (2003) TheTicket Chase. IEEE Spectrum,
January, 72-73
Shon, Z., Chen F, Chang, Y. (2003) Airline e-
commerce:the revolution in ticketing channels.
Journal of Air Transport Management 9 pp 325 –331
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