Festicket acquires Event Genius and Ticket Arena

Festicket, the U.K.-headquartered festival booking platform, has acquired U.K.-based ticketing and cashless point-of-sale (POS) platform Event Genius. The sale also includes Event Genius’s consumer facing brand, Ticket Arena, while further terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed.

Founded by Reshad Hossenally, Event Genius offers a complete event solution for event organisers, spanning things like online ticket sales, POS software, ticket scanning, seat reservations, marketing and analytics. It has powered major events including Wales Rally GB, Motion Bristol, Annie Mac’s Lost & Found Festival, Summer Daze, Ibiza Rocks and BPM Festival.

Festicket co-founder and CEO Zack Sabban tells me that over the last couple of years the company has invested heavily in the B2C side of its platform to help users discover new festival experiences and book festival trips, and this year that has paid off with accelerated growth from long tail events. Therefore, in order to continue on this growth trajectory, it was agreed with the board that Festicket needed to invest more in B2B tools to operationally scale the way it works with its network of ~8,000 suppliers.

“Giving them more independence on the Festicket two-sided platform via self-service tools would allow us to be more deeply integrated into suppliers’ supply chains and ultimately optimise our units economics,” he says. The Event Genius acquisition is clearly the start of this.

To that end, the resulting “Event Genius by Festicket” will be an end-to-end platform for organisers and fans alike, says Festicket, providing a complete offering for the live entertainment industry.

The platform aims to bring together “technology and expertise” covering ticketing, accommodation, travel & packages, marketing, data & analytics, access control, POS/cashless payment services, fan engagement tools, and more.

Meanwhile, Event Genius’s 20+ staff, based in Leeds in the U.K., are joining Festicket. This also includes Event Genius founder Hossenally, who becomes Festicket Chief Supply Chain Officer.

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