FlipTix, a sports and entertainment ticketing startup, has created a tertiary market under the slogan: “We sell unused time.”
Under the assumption that venues almost universally prohibit fans from re-entry, seats usually remain empty if a fan decides to leave early.
FlipTix would encourage fans who exit before the end of a game, tournament, concert or festival to press an ‘I’m gone’ button in an app.
This action allows the event promoter to resell the ticket while the original ticket buyer receives some remuneration, which could be anything from cash to gift cards to T-shirts to a discount on another ticketing package.
With its app and GPS technology, FlipTix can confirm that particular fans have left, invalidate the ticket’s barcode, target nearby fans with push notifications, resell the tickets and issue new tickets to fill the seats and offer the venue new customers who might purchase concessions or merchandise. 
For its model to work, FlipTix needs to integrate with official ticketing platforms and partner with promoters, teams, leagues and venues.
“If our partners don’t make money, we don’t make money,” Jason Siegel, chief executive of FlipTix, said.
“Our whole vision is that we want to drive people in because that then drives all the ancillary sales that go along with someone being in a facility.”
FlipTix will price the flipped tickets based on an algorithm — with factors such as remaining time and current score — that will become increasingly sophisticated with more data. Not only will that data aid its own efforts, it will also open up new avenues for marketing and facility management.
“There’s going to be many opportunities for this kind of technology that we’re not even thinking of today,” Siegel said. “The data we’re going to be collecting — they rarely collect dynamic exit data of an event, right? As our community grows, we’re going to be able to have a statistically significant sampling of the exiting of people from a facility.”
Events will be broken down to short and long formats, with the latter potentially including multi-day college conference basketball tournaments or music festivals like Coachella where Siegel thinks the same wristband could be flipped upwards of a dozen times.
“Different fans for different bands,” he said, “and people could really come and go and flip their ticket for a fraction of the price.”
Image: Monika P
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