Werfpop: From Free Entry to Paid Festival Tickets

For years, Werfpop was a free festival welcoming around 18,000 visitors each year. But after the COVID-19 pandemic and rising costs, free entry was no longer financially sustainable for the 2022 edition.

For the first time, Werfpop switched to paid tickets, using booqi.me to manage ticket sales.

Festival chairman Bob Schrover looks back on the transition and shares his experience.

How did you sell tickets before using booqi.me?

“Before this, we did not sell tickets at all. Entry was free, and visitors could enter and leave the festival grounds whenever they wanted.

We had always hoped to keep it that way, but for this edition it was no longer financially possible. That is why we switched to paid tickets.

It felt like a big step, but selling tickets through booqi.me went very smoothly from the start.”

How did you use booqi.me?

“We started selling tickets three months before the festival. At first, most sales came through word of mouth. In the final weeks before the event, ticket sales really picked up.

The biggest rush came on the day before the festival and on the festival day itself. Across those two days, we sold around 1,000 tickets.

In total, we sold 11,000 tickets. Around 300 were sold at the entrance, while the rest were sold online through booqi.me.”

What were your expectations?

“Our first goal was, of course, to sell all available tickets. And we did.

Booqi.me also gave us real-time insight into our capacity and the number of visitors already on site. This allowed us to adjust capacity throughout the day, as we could see when visitors had already left the festival grounds.

Because of the warm weather, we also wanted to avoid long queues at the entrance. Fortunately, that worked out really well. The mobile ticket-scanning app allowed visitors to enter quickly and kept the flow moving.”

How did booqi.me help make this a success?

“The mobile ticket-scanning app gave us a lot of flexibility. Having real-time insight into visitor numbers was also very useful. On top of that, the reports from booqi.me give us valuable information.

From a marketing perspective, we now know much more about our visitors than we did before.

Another major benefit was booqi.me’s upsell feature. It allowed us to ask visitors for a donation during checkout. Around one in three visitors chose to donate.

It was great to see how much support visitors wanted to give the festival, and for the foundation it was a welcome financial contribution as well.”