TicketSellers and ecolibrium have announced the beginning of a 3-year partnership to conduct the UK Festival Industry’s largest ever travel data survey of crew and artists, at the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) Congress, 1st February 2024.
It is widely understood that travel and transport is the biggest contributor to carbon emissions at greenfield music festivals, but until now it has been challenging for events to collect all the data they need on contractor and artist travel to measure, understand and reduce emissions.
It has also not yet been possible to generate an accurate picture of the true impact of travel in the festival industry, due to the challenges events face collecting data and the resulting lack of comparable data at industry scale.
With the TicketSellers’ product Eventree established as the industry standard for crew accreditation, the partnership will leverage Eventree’s reach and ecolibrium’s expertise on sustainable travel to gather crew and artist travel data in a consistent format throughout the 2024 festival season.
For the first time ever, the goal is to survey every single person working at all the medium to large festivals in the UK at the point they arrive on site. On arrival individuals will be asked a few simple questions about their travel. Gathering the data at this point will lead to the most accurate results, instead of trying to predict travel plans ahead of time.
This data will be analysed using a combination of people-power and AI to produce an individual report for each event and an aggregated report for the industry as a whole.
Phil Hayes, CEO of TicketSellers says: “Being the industry leader in event management and accreditation software gives us an opportunity to give back. We’re seen as one of the most sustainable ticket agents thanks to the work we’ve done with ecolibrium over the years, but this project is an opportunity to really cement our position as the ethical ticket agent, whilst producing some much needed data in the field of sustainability and climate.”
Naomi Lawson, Project Manager at ecolibrium says: “This is an exciting partnership – it will provide festivals [using the Eventree system] with the data they need without additional costs or effort, and provide the industry with a dataset that will help us to understand travel and establish robust benchmarks. In 2023, we’ve been working with several UK festivals to explore how to collect data on all travel types, particularly scope 3, and this has helped to understand what events need, and how we can do this hassle-free.”
John Rostron, CEO of The Association of Independent Festivals comments: “As an industry we’re keenly aware how important data is when it comes to delivering better audience experiences, more streamlined processes and ultimately more successful businesses. The collaboration that Ticketsellers and ecolibrium announced at this year’s Festival Congress is a really smart, focused effort to use data in our combined pursuit of greater sustainability. If there’s one thing AIF members are good at, it’s engaging collectively with opportunities like this to improve practices and create a better sector for everyone. We’re really excited to see where this takes us.”
