Since 2013, Salt Lake City Comic Con has become one of the most attended Comic Con events in North America, seeing up to 120,000 attendees in one event. SLCC was in need of a solution to streamline their ticket administration process and reduce ticket fraud. Their most critical need: to reduce guest wait times. In prior events, a ticket holder could spend as much as four hours in line while event staff was forced to manually verify each patrons’ pass holder status and issue the appropriate color wristband associated with that access level. After receiving the wristbands, ticketholders would be ushered into a second (and potentially longer) line to enter the general admission floor of the show.
Serialio.com and Utah Media Group partnered together to tackle this issue and provide Salt Lake City Comic Con with a state of the art RFID solution that would improve the guest’s experience.
Redesigning the modus operandi in administering guest’s RFID wristbands would be the first and pivotal target goal. To do this, Serialio.com supplied thirty Scanfob® NFC-BB2 Wireless RFID Readers, twenty-four idChamp RS3 RFID Readers, as well as over sixty thousand NFC wristbands to the event production team. Attendees would now receive their wristbands via mail prior to the convention. Once a customer had received their designated NFC wristband, they would be instructed to register the wristband on the SLCC Website. Ticket holders were required to submit their wristband ID number, along with the ticket holder’s name and contact information. Registrants were also given the option to link their Facebook Account to their SLCC wristband.
By implementing this new process, SLCC reduced the wait times at the will call station from hours to minutes, while compiling a user supplied database before the event even commenced. Furthermore, access to attendee information in real time virtually eliminated the potential for unauthorized access, ticket fraud, and / or ticket sharing.