Faulty Towers The Dining Experience

As an interactive production, the show aims to eliminate traditional theatrical boundaries, removing the fourth wall and giving actors free rein to improvise and bounce off the audience. The immersive experience of dining amongst the antics of the performers allows the show to be performed in many types of spaces as long as there’s room to dine – whether it be held at an arts centre or a restaurant.

This means the show has many challenges operationally – from seating to prop placements. There’s a small capacity for an audience of only 120 people who are all served a meal during the performance. This requires some unique ticketing features, as additional information must be gathered from ticketholders.

Executive Producer Jared Harford said:

“What is unique to us is that we serve a three-course meal at every show so we need to gather all our attendees’ dietary requirements. This was very admin heavy before Eventfinda involving individual emails to ticketholders. We now use Ticketholder Questions to require people to provide us with what we need to know during the purchase process. Using Evenfinda’s Ticketholder Questions has simplified gathering vital information and cut out so much admin time.”

Other features have supported Jared and his team during uncertain times:

“Being able to easily and regularly check sales and live data is reassuring” and when it’s been needed he says, “the marketing support was so quick and responsive.”

As the company is focused on one main touring event in Australia they often list multiple events. The ability to list a similar event has helped with event listing set-up times.

Jared explains, “We come back to Melbourne about five times a year so it’s so simple to just hit ‘list similar’ and Eventfinda loads everything up for me. It’s much faster than if I had to load each individual event plus images each time.” 

The team at Interactive Theatre International manage many events globally and finding the right ticketing partner can be difficult. For the Australian arm of the operation, they did their research to assess which ticketing partner would best suit their needs.

Jared remarked, “A member of our team did a whole lot of research into ticketing software and all the different providers. She had used Eventfinda in her previous role after trying many different platforms and found it to be the best. A few of our venues already used Eventfinda too and we also knew that it was the recommended platform from the Melbourne Comedy Festival.”

They had been frustrated with their existing ticketing software as it just provided a ticketing system but not the marketing cut through.

“We found that the amount of time and money spent on setting up ticketing on the website, listing the event on many ‘what’s on’ pages and the marketing spend was not cost-effective. Now, we’ve cut all that time listing on multiple websites and drastically dropped our marketing spend,” said Jared.

On top of the time and money-saving, Eventfinda’s reputation played a major role in the decision to switch providers as Jared recalls:

“The thing that made us say ‘yes we’re going to jump on board’ was the previous experience and strong recommendations from colleagues.”

In 2018, the company switched from their previous ticketing software to Eventfinda for the Melbourne Comedy Festival.

Jared says, “That season went ridiculously well in terms of sales. It sold really well and quite effortlessly. There was minimal effort from our side.”

Today, he’s very happy with that decision:

“Eventfinda provides us with an organic reach to audiences that we just don’t get elsewhere.”