Ferve Tickets alternatives: the whole festival, not just the ticketing

Ferve Tickets is an Australian-owned event ticketing company, operating since 1996 from Melbourne, that sells white-label ticketing to festivals and venues, from 20 events a year to thousands. Its name is a mashup of festival and verve, and film festivals are among its best-known clients: the Melbourne International Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Adelaide Film Festival and CinefestOZ all sell through it today. It offers web, iPhone, Android and iPad sales, point of sale, scanning, passes and a flexible fee engine, and it prices every client by custom quote.

Ferve is a ticketing system. Its own pricing page describes how it plugs into a website you run elsewhere: pricing widgets you embed in your own pages, white-label templates for the checkout, and a REST API. Festivals look for a Ferve alternative when they want the other half handled too: the festival website, a programme built around sections and strands, the app and the checkout as one product from one supplier, at a price they can see before the first call.

A festival's audience does not experience a ticket engine. It experiences the programme launch, the film page, the pass, the app on the day and the door. When the website comes from one supplier and the ticketing from another, the festival pays for the join: an agency to keep film pages in step with sessions, a separate app project, and a programme structure rebuilt each edition.

Filmgrail ships them as one product. Sections and strands are first-class content in the CMS, film pages and sessions come from the same record, passes are sold before the programme exists and redeemed later, and industry screenings stay off public sale while accredited guests can still book them. The whole thing rolls forward to next year without a rebuild.

And the price is on our website: a flat annual fee, with no per-ticket fees on your audience's basket. For the wider market, see film festival ticketing platforms compared.

Festivals already running their public edition on Filmgrail include the Bergen International Film Festival, Norway's largest film festival with over 120 documentary and fiction films a year, and the Norwegian International Film Festival in Haugesund, which runs a public programme and the New Nordic Films industry market in the same week from one system. Haugesund's main venue, Edda Kino, runs on the same platform all year, so the festival and the cinema share one infrastructure.

In Australia, Wallis Cinemas, a family-owned South Australian circuit independent for more than seventy years, runs its website and ticketing on Filmgrail.

Because the public edition is where a festival earns its audience, and it deserves a website and app that are unmistakably yours: sections and strands as first-class content, passes sold before the programme exists and redeemed later, industry accreditation beside public sale, and a site built to stay up the hour the programme drops. The edition rolls forward every year as content, not as a new build.

A mid-size international festival pays about $5,000 a year, flat, with no per-ticket fees, and smaller festivals pay less (see pricing). If we already integrate your ticketing and payment provider you can be live in a few weeks; a provider we have not connected before takes about a month.

See it before you talk to anyone: build your festival's prototype in 30 seconds — your own festival site and festival back office, from your current address. Then book a festival demo against your real programme, and read how the festival platform works.