The world’s track cycling elite descended upon Ommisport Apeldoorn for the 2018 UCI Track Cycling World Championships – the flagship event in track cycling. From 28 February until 4 March 2018, athletes from 40 nations around the globe competed in track cycling’s pinnacle event with the host country topping the medals board.
Timelines:
- Planning with the client began in September 2017
- Onsale from 5 October 2017
- Event live from 28 February until 4 March 2018
What services and expertise were required?
Ticketmaster provided online and box office ticket sales, access control, operations, marketing and promotional support, a branded ticketing platform and provided the sale of Ticketmaster Collector tickets – a dedicated, fully branded, collectable souvenir ticket.
The team:
One of our many strengths is in providing best-in-class, hands-on service to our event partners, so our goal was to ensure that the event was fully supported both before, during and after for both our client and fans. The event was supported by a core, on the ground event team made up of field IT, marketing, client services and contact centre support.
What were the challenges?
We’ve worked across multiple cycling events over recent years, so we’re fortunate to have a large marketable database of cycling fans, which was helpful to our client. One of our challenges was in identifying the most relevant fans within our database and ensuring that we communicated with them in the right way.
As with all major events, smooth running on the day is imperative, and so one of the key aspects we had to ensure we got right was to implement an effective operational structure on the ground. Fortunately, we’re an experienced team so event day operations is one of our key strengths.
What was unique?
Cycling is incredibly popular here in the Netherlands and at Ticketmaster we’re always looking to find new creative ways for fans to treasure the memories from the events they attend. That’s why we were particularly pleased to be able to offer a 2018 UCI Track Cycling World Championships branded Collector ticket for this event which proved very popular with fans.
The Results:
Over 17,000 tickets, including sales of Collector ticket, were sold to fans across 30 countries with over 25% of sales coming through Ticketmaster channels – a hugely pleasing result for both our team and our client.