Increase Attendance by Connecting with Online Travel Agencies

Gateway solution simplifies the integration process, enables selling of live tickets

by Kimberly Weidman, Marketing Manager

Year after year, your attraction is challenged with increasing attendance. One way to open additional revenue streams is by building more relationships with third-party distributors or online travel agencies (OTA) to broaden your reach to potential visitors locally and globally.

Previously however, there were some challenges that made doing business with multiple OTAs costly and time-intensive as well as resulted in less-than-ideal customer experiences.

In evaluating these hurdles, Gateway set out to develop a solution to overcome them. The result of which is Galaxy Connect.

A cloud-based platform, Galaxy Connect utilizes a single endpoint, streamlining integration for both attractions and distributors alike while dramatically reducing development, maintenance and support costs.

By integrating directly through the attraction’s native ticketing/point-of-sale system, third-party distributors are now able to sell live tickets – even for capacity-managed events.

Before Galaxy Connect, guests would receive a voucher that had to be exchanged at the ticket window, oftentimes waiting in long lines. With Connect, guests can now proceed directly to the front gate where their ticket is scanned and they are quickly admitted.

In the case of a capacity-managed event, if a show sold out prior to a guest presenting their voucher, their expectations were not met and they either had to select another available time or miss the event entirely, resulting in a bad guest experience. With Connect, guests (as well as attractions and distributors) can rest easy knowing that their ticket was pulled from live inventory, ensuring a good customer experience all around.

By working with live tickets instead of vouchers, the reconciliation process is streamlined for both attraction and distributor, saving countless hours of manual processing for your operations team, freeing them up to interact more with visitors.

Another benefit of Galaxy Connect is the real-time generation and delivery of electronic tickets, eliminating the need to print, store and ship large batches of valuable ticket inventory for resellers or distributors. This automation significantly reduces the amount of manual labor involved in ticket fulfillment while eliminating security issues of losing stock tickets.

If you’re an attraction or online travel agency and want to learn more about Galaxy Connect, contact us today to get the conversation started.