Access All Areas May 2019 | Page 6

This month’s catch up… Leicester promotes £285m sporting venue impact Leicester has launched a prospectus to promote its £285m sporting economy. The venues provide 8,405 jobs and attract two million visitors to the region every year. The announcement comes ahead of the first Big Sporting Weekend 27-28 April. The new Premier Sporting Location Prospectus for Leicester and Leicestershire was officially launched at the Leicester Riders home game against London City Royals. The Prospectus showcases the extensive range of sporting venues in the city and county, the national and international sports events 06 that have been hosted and the other events and conferences they are able to host. Ali Clements, Leicester-Shire and Rutland Sport’s Economy and Sport Growth Manager said: “There is such an incredible array of sporting venues available to host a whole variety of events, some of which many local residents may not have visited. The Premier Sporting Location branding and work is the start of showcasing Leicester and Leicestershire’s offer and reaching out to attract more events, conferences and visitors to enjoy the unique offer available in Leicester and Leicestershire.” Events ‘must learn’ from Burning Man ticketing failure The annual Burning Man ticket Main Sale faced serious technical issues, and Ticketsocket says the industry must learn from the debacle. The Main Sale, which offered up approximately 23,000 tickets and 10,000 vehicle passes faced ‘unexpected technical issues’ with users reporting problems ranging from would-be buyers being booted out of their place in line to being incorrectly admonished for alleged digital cheating. Some were told all tickets were sold out while others were still merrily purchasing away. Mark Miller, co-founder and CEO of TicketSocket told Access: “Burning Man’s ticketing fiasco demonstrates what can happen when the queued traffic for ticketing registration doesn’t implement the lottery mechanism mentioned earlier and too many concurrent users try to all buy at the same time. In this case, there were more people trying to buy then than were tickets for sale. Therefore, in order to avoid anything like this happening again in the future, they need to completely rethink the structure of their system and its capabilities, to ensure they have a process in place to set expectations properly and handle traffic at scale. “Setting lottery mechanisms in place is an effective tool in order to help limit difficulties when large numbers of customers are concurrently trying to purchase tickets. This mechanism also creates an equal opportunity for fans to access tickets. “Ticketing technology must be engineered to hold a queue of over 1 million people using the latest cloud scaling technologies, to throttle customers and to give them an enjoyable and equal opportunity to purchase tickets.”