Features
Axs Aces Sprint Center Onsale
AEG’s Axs ticketing platform has faced its largest test yet with the onsales of two major concerts at the Sprint Center in Kansas City, Mo., and passed with flying colors, according to officials.
The 18,000-capacity Sprint Center was recently announced as the first AEG arena to begin using Axs, which launched in beta mode at smaller venues in Denver, San Francisco, Seattle and Dallas last year.
While beta testing for the system had apparently gone off without a hitch thus far, Murphy’s Law states that something would have to go wrong when putting Axs to the test with Lady Antebellum and Drake onsales – on Friday the 13th, no less.
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CMT Artists of the Year taping, Nashville, Tenn.
But that wasn’t the case, as Bryan Perez, president of AEG’s digital, ticketing and media division, told Pollstar the onsales went “flawlessly.”
“We’ve now successfully run the gamut of every situation that a ticketing company could encounter,” he said. “It was an important day for us to get through. We think that the success of the system and the model here today means that you’ll start to see the pace of our migration and our initiatives accelerate throughout the rest of the year in terms of migrating the rest of our portfolio.”
So what, exactly, made the onsales such a success?
Perez and Sprint Center GM Brenda Tinnen said it all boiled down to consumer feedback regarding some of Axs’ unique features like virtual waiting rooms with real-time updates of available seats and the ability to compare multiple seat locations within a single transaction.
“The feedback that we have received just this morning in the few short hours that we’ve been on sale has been great,” Tinnen told Pollstar. “The consumer process of them being able to go into the waiting room, upload all of their customer information before they get into the sales process, being able to see the seat location in real time on a map on the screen … it really is transparent.
“It takes a lot of the guesswork out of the transaction and its very easy just to mouse over each of the sections and everything comes up right there on the screen so you’re not surprised by it,” she said.
Axs is also working to expand its offerings with additional ticketing products such as mobile applications, new types of purchase experiences and social media integration.
Sprint Center brings the total AEG venues using the Axs platform to nine, and Perez expects that number to grow to include third-party users soon.
Photo: AP Photo
T-Mobile Google Music launch party, Los Angeles, Calif.
“We believe we have not only a great system with great points of differentiation in the marketplace, but one that’s backed by a well-funded, multi-faceted company that brings a lot to the table by AEG,” he said. “The combination of those two things is really going to give us an opportunity to succeed with growing this business via third parties and it is absolutely our intention to do that.”