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

 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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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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