07/12/2006

Film fest tickets selling fast

FROM STAFF REPORTS

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TRAVERSE CITY — The Traverse City Film Festival set a record for out-of-the-gate sales with the company handling its ticketing system.

Tickets went on sale Friday at noon and by Saturday, the festival had sold about 40 percent of 36,600 available tickets. Vancouver-based synercom/edi is facilitating online ticket sales for the festival. The company handles ticketing for about 30 film festivals in North America, including Sundance and Tribeca.

Early response here maxed out capacity and prompted delays for some ordering online.

"Our festivals, typically, if they are doing well they will do about 10 percent of their capacity on the first day of sales," said Arne Hermann, synercom/edi president. "In Traverse City, when we turned it on at noon your time, within the first few hours they had done about 38 percent of their capacity of sales ... about 80 percent of it would have been online."

The result was some backups and time-outs for customers as orders came in so fast that credit card approvals were being processed every two seconds. It was a temporary situation, and one that would not have warranted the fledgling festival investing thousands more dollars in a higher-capacity system, Hermann said.

"They're bringing up this infrastructure to handle (sales) for just a short period of time," he added. "It was an exceptional day and exceptional circumstances — and also unprecedented."

Sales have continued at a steady pace. As of Tuesday morning, about 40 of the festival's 82 screenings had sold out. By late in the day, ticket sales were up to 52 percent of capacity. With less than three weeks to go, organizers are urging local residents who want to attend to get tickets while they can.

"People were able to buy tickets right up until the last few days last year locally," said festival founder Michael Moore, adding that at the rate tickets are going now, that's probably not likely this year. "I'm afraid a lot of local people are not going to be able to see the films they want to see, because people from out of town are buying up a lot of the tickets."