DIY ticketing for Melbourne Motor Show

Stephen Withers
Friday, 29 February 2008 11:17

Business IT - Technology

Outsourcing has almost become a religion in some quarters, but sometimes it's better to do a job in-house even if it's not a core activity.

Case in point: one activity of the Victorian Automobile Chamber of Commerce (VACC) is the Melbourne Motor Show, and while most organisations would outsource ticketing and admission to companies such as Ticketek and InfoSalons, VACC used its own development resources to build a system that covers everything from online ticket sales to reporting on the pattern of admissions.

Peter Wright, manager, information technology at the VACC explained that the motivation was economic: with relatively low admission prices (eg, $A18), there's not much room to pay an external operator.

Visitors buy tickets from the VACC's e-ticket.com.au web site, print them, and then present them at the venue doors, minimising queuing. The bar codes are scanned by an application running on a Symbol handheld device which checks that the bar code is valid and has not been previously presented, and logs the entry.

When the system was used at the Brisbane Motor Show, door staff were able to scan one ticket a second, but since then the software has been rewritten with an emphasis on speed throughout. "You don't want queues at the door," said Wright.

A Motorola wireless LAN connects the handhelds with a server, transferring information about newly sold tickets and those that have been used. In the original version of the software (used at the 2007 Motor Show), full database synchronisation was used, but a rewrite saw a switch to a socket-based store-and-forward scheme. The result is simpler and more robust, according to Wright, though "perhaps less classically elegant."

"It's really a transactional system, so [we decided to] keep it simple," he added.