I’ve been running a retreat in Morocco for years and as a European organiser the only ticketing solution I found that seemed to fit was Eventbrite. It was easy to use, the ticket widget looked nice on my booking page and they took an extra few bucks on each ticket sold. All in all it seemed like a good deal at the time.

Why even use a third party ticketing website?

It wasn’t for all their event management tools. I didn’t need their databases, their QR codes, their automated emails – I just wanted people to buy their ticket and turn up. I was running a retreat, not a night club party.

But it gave people confidence. If I’d just put my own bank details on the page it might have occurred to them that anyone can put up a website and maybe the retreat didn’t even exist…but when they saw the Eventbrite widget with its corporate branding it promised a certain kind of trust.

Over time however Eventbrite kept increasing their fees until it wasn’t just a few bucks per ticket extra the customer had to pay but 15-25 bucks more each time! That made my retreats seem quite a bit more expensive. And what were they doing for me anyway apart from the nice ticket widget?

I searched around for alternatives and spent 2 full days signing up to the likes of Eventbee, Eventzilla, Ticketbud, Zapevent and a whole bunch of other absurdly-named ticketing websites (hard to find a good name these days that’s available, I guess)  and one after the other let me down. Or they didn’t cater for European organisers, or they wanted all the money up front and paid you after the event, or they seemed okay but then the design on their ticketing widget to be embedded on the website was just terrible and didn’t inspire any confidence on the part of customers – the one thing I needed them to do!

Then I came across Ticket Tailor. They had a monthly plan which made me nervous at first but then they didn’t add anything to the ticket. Zero. So even for a small operator like me who sold a hundred tickets a year it came to just a few bucks a ticket again. Plus they let you add your own admin fee on top of the ticket so you didn’t end up losing and could even cover the inevitable charges of Stripe and Paypal who provide the system to accept bank cards.

Their design was good, the interface was simple and non-clunky and it worked. And now they even have a pay-as-you-go option where you pay about 60 cents a ticket rather than a monthly plan.

So if you run retreats or festivals it’s really a no-brainer. Ticket Tailor comes out way cheaper and simpler than all the rest by a mile.

Why am I writing this post about ticketing websites? Do I get kickbacks from Ticket Tailor to promote them?

Nope. I just reason that some festival or retreat organisers might also be interested in promoting their festival or promoting their retreat here…