Werfpop

Previously, Werfpop was a free festival that attracted 18,000 visitors annually. Forced by Corona and rising prices in the market, the 2022 edition was paid for the first time. Booqi.me helped them make the switch.

Bob Schrover, chairman of the festival, shares his findings and looks back on another successful edition.

How did you sell tickets before using Booqi?

Before, we had no ticket sales at all. Admission was free and anyone could freely enter and leave the festival grounds. We actually always wanted to keep it free as well, but this edition this proved financially unfeasible. So we switched to paid tickets. For ticket sales, we used Booqi. We found this extremely exciting but everything went very smoothly. 

And how did you use Booqi?

We started ticket sales three months before the start. In the beginning this went by mouth, but in the last weeks before the festival we saw a huge spike in ticket sales. The real peak was on the day before and the day itself, on those days we sold 1,000 tickets. In total, we sold 11,000 tickets, of which 300 were sold at the door and the rest online through Booqi. 

What were your expectations?

First of all, we obviously wanted to sell all available tickets. And we succeeded in doing so! Even better: through Booqi, we always had real-time insight into what our capacity was and how many people were already inside. That way, we could scale up capacity during the day because we saw that visitors had also already gone home. 

Furthermore, we wanted to avoid long queues at the entrance at all times with the hot weather. Fortunately, this went super well, as the mobile app scanners we had allowed everyone to move through quickly.

Can you briefly outline how Booqi.me helped you achieve this success?

The mobile app for scanning tickets gave us a lot of flexibility. In addition, seeing our visitor numbers in real time was very nice. The reports from Booqi.me are also very useful for us. Marketing-wise, we now have much more data on our customers that we didn't have before.

What was also a huge advantage was that we used booqi.me's upsell option to ask for a donation. In this, we saw that 1/3rd of people donated to us. On the one hand, that is of course really super nice to see that visitors are giving us a warm heart, but for the foundation this is of course also a nice windfall financially.