Objective
The California State Fair ranks in as one of the largest fairs in the county, welcoming hundreds of thousands of attendees during its 18 day season.  With many different avenues for ticketing, the fair needed a way to unify their online gate admissions, ride passes and parking passes under one system.  They needed a solution that could sell all of their tickets online and seamlessly integrate with the on-site validation systems they were comfortable with.

A flexible online ticketing solution would be needed to validate tickets using three separate scanning systems:

• Gate Admission Tickets:   Required scanning at the front gates by their existing onsite point of sales software.
• Ride Passes:  Needed to be scanned by their midway operator’s own unique system.
• Parking Passes:   Required a separate wireless scanning solution that could validate online tickets in remote locations.

Solution
INTERACTIVE TICKETING has a superb track record when it comes to integration.  For over two years they had been integrating with large ski areas and fairs with excellent results.  For the California State Fair, they identified the three key redemption areas and produced a system that offered, Gate Admissions, Ride Passes and Parking Passes in one convenient purchase form that utilized batches of unique barcodes for each ticket group. Each ticket group would require a separate means for barcode validation as different on-site areas were using existing technology.

Gate Admission tickets needed to be scanned by the fair’s on-site point of sales system or “POS” system.  INTERACTIVE TICKETING used their consignment code technology and worked with the fair’s ticket office to create batches of barcodes, generated by the fair’s POS system.  These barcodes were then uploaded into the online ticketing system and output on every Gate Admission ticket purchased online.  When customers came through the gate, there tickets were seamlessly validated by the fair’s POS system which identified its own barcodes.

A similar process was also used for the Ride Passes.  The fair’s midway provider, Ray Cammack Shows, had their own method for validating ride passes in much the same way as the fair’s POS system.  Ray Cammack worked with INTERACTIVE TICKETING to generate consignment codes from their system which would then print out on every Ride Pass sold online.  When a customer came through with their Ride Pass eticket, it had Ray Cammack’s barcode on it and was easily validated by their on-site scanning solution.

This was the first year the fair was able to sell their Parking Passes online.  Previously, it had been a challenge scan tickets in their parking lot, without power or an Internet connection.  This was a perfect opportunity to use INTERACTIVE TICKETING’s wireless scanning option which brings real-time online scanning to any location.  For each parking ticket sold online an INTERACTIVE TICKETING barcode was printed on the eticket.  These barcodes were easily scanned into the purchase database using a wireless PDA scanner.  Ticket validation statistics and the synchronization of barcode numbers happens across all PDA units in real-time.

The Result
By using INTERACTIVE TICKETING’s consignment code feature, the California State Fair was able to unify and sell three different groups of tickets online and maximize online sales.  Since this tool used barcodes generated by the existing gate and midway validation systems, they were able to seamlessly scan all tickets at the correct locations.  A wireless scanning solution also made selling online parking passes possible for the first time in the fairs history due to the flexibility of operating without power or an on-site Internet connection at the parking lot.

Pat Conner
Box Office Manager
California State Fair