Crystal Bridges and The Momentary
Creating a better ticketing experience with digital passes
If you’ve bought tickets for a train, flight or sporting event over the last few years, you have likely been invited to add them to your Apple or Google ‘wallet’. Our friends at Crystal Bridges and their sister venue The Momentary tasked us with building digital passes for both their events tickets and memberships to make life that little bit easier for audiences visiting their venues.
Like many of our clients, Crystal Bridges use Tessitura as their ticketing & CRM system and have integrated with Tessitura’s own purchase path, TNEW. So we’ve created a solution that can be used by any organisation using TNEW.
The challenge
Storing tickets, vouchers, and membership cards as Apple and Google passes in a mobile wallet is a convenient solution, especially for organisations without a dedicated mobile app.
While e-tickets, typically sent as an email with a PDF attachment, were a step forward, they still have challenges of their own, such as failing to load without mobile signal.
Digital passes avoid these situations happening as they’re already stored locally on the mobile device itself and are easily retrieved regardless of whether or not you have wifi or signal.
The solution
Getting set up
To get started we needed to set up developer accounts for both Apple and Google to start building sample passes. This meant we could do a trial run of the passes using ‘fake’ data, with a view to have the data fields and wireframes agreed with Crystal bridges before progressing to design using real data.
Building the templates
Once everyone was happy with the sample passes, we modified the settings and assets to lay out the passes to match the wireframes we’d created, and styled them against the brand identity of Crystal Bridges and The Momentary using the appropriate logos and colours.
Dynamic digital passes
These passes integrate with Tessitura and TNEW, allowing users to add event tickets and membership cards to their Apple or Google Wallets directly from booking confirmation emails, user account dashboards, or membership welcome emails.
Our web-service requests the data from Tessitura and maps this on to the pass templates. Apple passes are generated files that are stored securely in S3 (an Amazon Web Service cloud storage solution) while the Google passes create a unique link.
Building mechanisms for users to get their passes
We then pop the familiar Apple Wallet and Google Pay pass buttons throughout the customer’s journey. Having the buttons in multiple places means customers are given consistent prompts to download their digital passes, helping to make the feature easy to identify and more likely taken advantage of.
Interested in setting up digital passes at your organisation? Just get in touch.
