Customer Snapshot
- Years Since the Last Amigo Airsho: 12
- # Check-Ins In 5 Minutes: 989
- # Transferred Tickets: 1,462
After a 12-year hiatus, the MountainStar Sports Group Amigo Airsho returned in 2024 at the prestigious Biggs Army Airfield on Fort Bliss. The fun-filled family event welcomed tens of thousands of attendees each day, with free admission for kids 12 and under and active duty military. Among their exciting acts was a display by the Canadian Forces Snowbirds.
TicketSignup Sales Rep and air show afficionado Devon Wallace worked closely with the Amigo Airsho to ensure their new technology was implemented seamlessly. Additionally, he was on-site to help facilitate check-in and ensure volunteers were trained. He came back excited to share the successes of the event.
Moving Ticketing Online
Returning after such a long absence meant the Amigo Airsho had to start from scratch on many fronts. First up: twelve years ago, they had no online ticket sales. In 2024, they knew advance, online tickets would be crucial. At the 2023 ICAS Convention the Amigo Airsho met with several ticketing companies as they explored the option of offering online tickets in the show’s return.”
Selecting TicketSignup for the move online paid off: the event had record-setting attendance, with the majority of tickets purchased online.
A Flexible Ticketing Website
Amigo Airsho has their own year-round website. However, it was important to them that their ticketing site feel legitimate, especially since it was the first time guests would be encountering a ticketing site for the show. They leaned into the yellow in their brand to create a ticketing event website that was simple and efficient.
Using the TicketSignup website builder, they added the main Amigo Airsho website to the menu on their TicketSignup site. This ensured a seamless interaction between purchasing and gathering information.
Free Tickets Are Free
Like many events, the Amigo Airsho needed to offer free tickets to some groups. These included:
- Giveaway opportunities, such as at sporting events with a sponsor
- Military tickets that were free with GOVX verified coupon codes
They used Coupon Pools to organize and track the types of coupons offered and uses of each coupon. With Coupon Pools, they could not only track individual coupons, they could track the usage of types of coupons. For example, they could see all coupons used within the GOVX Military pool, or within the Giveaways pool.
The best part? While some Airsho vendors charge a fee based on all attendees (regardless of if they are paid attendees), TicketSignup has no charge for free tickets.
With TicketSignup, free tickets are always free.
Easy Ticket Management
Like many air shows, Amigo Airsho has a no-refund policy. But that doesn’t mean that ticket purchasers are out of luck if plans change. Instead, they offered flexible policies for self-serve ticket management, giving ticket holders two choices if they could no longer make their original ticket:
- Allowing ticket purchasers to transfer their tickets to another day (I.E., attending Sunday instead of Saturday if they had purchased a single-day entry). This also allows ticket purchasers to change to a more premium ticket, as long as the premium ticket has not exceeded capacity. The ticket purchaser simply pays the cost difference for the new ticket.
- Allowing ticket purchasers to transfer some or all of their tickets to another person. This ensures more tickets can be used, even if some or all of a party can no longer attend.
The Amigo Airsho did not charge a fee for any transfers, preferring to make transfers easy. However, they did setup TicketSignup to ensure no one could transfer a sold out ticket. Anyone who transferred to a more expensive ticket then their initial one would be charged the difference.
With nearly 1,500 tickets transferred, that’s a lot of customer service that never reached the Amigo Air Sho desk.
Ticket Transfers
Ticket Holder Transfers
Event Day Efficiency
Tickets App for CheckIn
A smooth check-in is key to a positive on-site experience for event attendees. The TicketSignup Tickets App for CheckIn made it easy for Amigo Airsho to welcome tens of thousands of visitors each day smoothly and efficiently.
To get the event off on the right foot, TicketSignup Sales Rep Devon Wallace trained volunteers on using the app on tablets provided to volunteers. On-site, there were 8-10 people scanning in attendee tickets, creating a speedy system. At the busiest time of day (12pm-1pm), more than 5,000 people were checked in within an hour. At the peak, nearly 1,000 were admitted within just 5 minutes.
On Saturday, volunteers went on break starting at 12:00pm. After looking at the Ticket CheckIn Interval Report from Saturday and realizing that that was their busiest time of day, Amigo Airsho was able to adjust break times on Sunday to ensure peak coverage at peak times.
Ticket Interval Report by 60 Minute Intervals
Bundling Sponsored Drinks with Tickets
One of the Amigo Airsho’s key sponsors wanted to provide event attendees with a free beverage. To simplify the process of fulfilling a beverage for each attendee, they used the TicketSignup store to bundle a beverage with each ticket (this store item was only available in a bundle). Then on event day, attendees could use the same QR code they used to check into the event to fulfill their beverage(s). Each beverage station was able to use the TicketSignup Tickets App to fulfill the store items tied to the specific QR code. This made it easy for attendees to access the QR code for drink fulfillment, and easy for the beverage stations to manage how many drink a ticket purchaser had remaining.
CheckIn Configurations for On-Site Volunteers
All told, the Amigo Airsho had three different groups of people using the TicketSignup Tickets App for three separate purposes: to sell tickets via the Square Integration, to check-in pre-purchased tickets, and to fulfill bundled store items. To limit confusion for each role, they setup three separate configurations for the app. This way, volunteers at the check-in only saw the tickets they had to check-in, while volunteers at the beverage stands only saw the store items that had (and hadn’t) been fulfilled.
Working Offline
While Amigo Airsho anticipated some connectivity challenges and had brought in a vendor to boost cell service at the gate. Unfortunately, the large crowds still caused intermittent outages at the check-in gate. Luckily, the TicketSignup Tickets App works in offline mode, with all attendee information loaded locally on the check-in devices. All changes (I.E., check-ins) were saved locally on the device, and then re-synced when service would return.
Summary: TicketSignup for Air Sho(w)s
Want to talk about how TicketSignup can streamline your online ticket sales and your event day? We’re heading out to the ICAS Convention in Las Vegas soon. We’d love to catch up there at booth 506 – or, schedule a call to talk with us any time!