TicketSellers and Ecolibrium to study festival crew travel emissions

TicketSellers and Ecolibrium have started on a three-year partnership to conduct a major travel data survey of crew and artists within the UK festival industry.

The project was recently announced at the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF) Congress.

Ecolibrium was initially founded in 2015 as Energy Revolution, a festival industry response to COP21 and research demonstrating that travel typically caused 80% of a festival’s carbon emissions.

The Bristol-headquartered firm has worked with events, artists and individuals to tackle travel emissions.

Previously, it has been challenging for events to collect all the data they needed on contractor and artist travel to measure, understand and reduce emissions. It has also been difficult to generate an accurate picture of the true impact of travel in the festival industry according to Ecolibrium, as there is a lack of information and comparable data at industry scale.

TicketSellers’ Eventree product is used for crew accreditation, and the partnership will leverage Eventree’s reach to gather crew and artists’ travel data throughout the 2024 festival season.

The aim of the project is to survey every single person working at all medium to large festivals in the UK at the point of arrival. Individuals will then be asked a few simple questions about their travel.

A combination of people and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will analyse the data before producing an individual report for each event, as well as an aggregated report for the industry as a whole.

“Being the industry leader in event management and accreditation software gives us an opportunity to give back,” said Phil Hayes, chief executive of TicketSellers.

“We’re seen as one of the most sustainable ticket agents thanks to the work we’ve done with Ecolibrium over the years, but this project is an opportunity to really cement our position as the ethical ticket agent, whilst producing some much needed data in the field of sustainability and climate.”

Naomi Lawson, project manager at Ecolibrium, added: “This is an exciting partnership – it will provide festivals [using the Eventree system] with the data they need without additional costs or effort, and provide the industry with a dataset that will help us to understand travel and establish robust benchmarks.”