Festicket announced today that they have raised a $680,000 seed-funding round in order to expand out their festival package deal site, which allows users to purchase ticket, accommodation, transport & extras all in one click. Reported originally by Steve O’hear of TechCrunch, Festicket launched in 2012, by Zack Sabban and Nathan Younes, as they encountered difficulties with attending out-of-town music festivals like Tomorrowland in Belgium, Sziget in Hungary, and Leeds in the UK. Now, with these and a total of 40 European music festivals available on their site, Festicket makes it easy for its 27,000 active members purchase tickets.
Festicket’s average basket prices is 290€, and is currently selling about 89% of the tickets that it gets in partnerships with festivals. Last week, I spoke with both of the founders at their London headquarters; with 73% of its members based in the UK, France (where both of the founders are from), and Germany, the founders said they will continue to focus on the building out their presence in Europe, where it is easier to consider international travel for music festivals (especially in the UK, where festival culture is the highest in the world).
The seed round investors include some notable French and UK investors, including Jacques-Antoine Granjon, #1 Seed (who invested in Onefeat), Kima Ventures, Playfair Capital, Ilan Abehassera, others. The team hopes to go from 40 to 100 festivals by the end of the year, “evolve our platform technology in order to automate our general sales process and constantly enhance our service with new features for our users,” says CTO Jonathan Younes.
One of the more interesting sides to Festicket is their B2B service, which, in addition to their B2C site, allows festivals to embed a “purchase package” button into their own site, as well as a dedicated gray-label version off Festicket branded for the festival, but powered by Festicket. CEO Zach Sabban told me that partners using this service have seen higher conversion rates on their sales, and hopes this engagement will continue to grow as well.
I have been a particular fan of their roll-out approach; namely, focusing on Europe first, as its festival culture is much more mature than in the US. While there is a veritable “festival season” in the UK, you are not likely to see a Californian attend Bonarroo if he knows the key line-up may also appear at Coachella a few months later. While Festicket said they will be gladly pursuing opportunities with major US festivals, it is clear that the European culture of travelling internationally or even nationally to see great festivals is much more mature, and will afford them a much quicker rise in revenue.
