Industry News

Weezevent opens first UK office

Weezevent, the ticketing operator and cashless payment specialist, has expanded into the UK events market through the opening of its new office in Manchester.

Paris-headquartered Weezevent offers event organisers a full white-label self-service ticketing solution via SaaS as well as cashless technology. The payments solution allows attendees to credit a dedicated event account, before or during the event, both offline or online allowing attendees to pay at the bars, restaurants and merchandising stalls using only their wristband.

Since launching in 2008 the firm has sold more than 35 million tickets for events such as festivals, concerts, sports fixtures and conferences.

Weezevent has already partnered with all of Live Nation’s major events in France, notably Download Paris and Lollapalooza Paris, and now hopes to build its presence in the UK market.

Pierre-Henri Deballon, chief executive and co-founder of Weezevent, said: “The UK is an incredible market and we’ve decided to invest in an outstanding team to offer our great services to events here. We believe that our world-class technology, combined with local experts will help us offer the best technologies to our UK clients.”

Weezevent also has a base in the Canadian city of Montreal and is to open an office in Madrid this year as well as launch a localised version of its software for the Italian market.

It said the average purchase at festivals grew from £12 (€14/$14.50) to £18 between 2015 and 2016. It found that 20 per cent more attendees load money with a cashless wristband versus a cashless card.

Benjamin Garner, Weezevent’s UK sales director, said: “For organisers it’s a profitable solution that delivers remarkable benefits, and its actually less work and less cost to deploy compared with a cash festival.

“What’s more important is it improves the experiences of the fans, it’s safer and it reduces queues by making 100 per cent of transactions contactless through the wristband with no upper limit on spend and no reliability on internet or server connections.

“There’s also an easy option to split your payments with friends, if you’re buying something like a pitcher of beer or a bottle of wine.”