Edinburgh Festival hopes to set up a joint box office for all 11 events | Edinburgh Festival

Edinburgh Festivals hopes to set up a single box for all 11 festivals in the city to make it easier to buy tickets and benefit from the “sea” of customer data they have.

Festival organizers hope that the international box office will allow them to increase ticket sales and attract wealthy sponsors of companies, such as Mastercard, to offset the severe cuts in government funding they expect to see in the coming years.

The idea has been discussed in private for some time, sources said, but it jumped to prominence when the Succession star. Brian Cox he said one was much needed in the art group discussion last year.

Festivals involved in the process, including major ones international festivalwill soon invite advertisers to explore how to integrate ticketing services with data from all 11 events, which in 2024 sold nearly 4m tickets in total. Others include a book festival and a film festival.

They believe it could lead to a year-round ticketing program.

But a Edinburgh The fringe festival, the city’s biggest, has jumped ahead by announcing plans for its own competition programme.

Tony Lankester, chief executive of the Fringe, told the Guardian that the team will be testing an early beta version with 1,000 festival-goers this August, after creating a home screen using AI Claude’s coding technique.

The festivals, which are already struggling with rising inflation and staff costs, as well as a new 5% tourist tax on hotel beds in Edinburgh, are also expected to face significant cuts from the Scottish government.

Scottish Ministers last year pledged £200m over three years to Scotland’s arts sector after the financial crisis, and in March they committed £1m over two years to new digital arts.

But ministers now need to save in the region of £5bn in their overall budget by 2030, and the cuts will be more severe in vulnerable areas such as culture.

The high cost of living in Edinburgh is also causing people to leave, reducing ticket sales and reducing the number of producers who travel to find new shows, Lankester said, when he revealed the program of this year’s event, which runs from 7 to 31 August.

The Post Office found that in June, Edinburgh has the most expensive hotel of 50 European cities, beating London, Venice, Paris and Barcelona. His “City cost barometer” he said it is the third most expensive city in Europe, behind Oslo and Copenhagen.

Lankester and other officials said Edinburgh festivals should integrate their ticketing services to make it easier to find and book tickets for all festivals.

He said the festivals were sitting on a huge “sea of ​​data” that should be used properly to understand what the audience wants and how they behave.

Some festivals agree but I believe more technical and marketing information is needed before they can integrate their ticketing services and include customer information.

They are in talks with VisitScotland, the country’s tourism body, the government’s arts body Creative Scotland and Edinburgh council to support the project.

“Edinburgh festivals are a half-billion dollar business,” said Fran Hegyi, chief executive of the international festival, which supports the massive box office partnership.

“A public partnership where we can grow to a billion over the next decade is an exciting prospect and will help boost the Scottish economy at a time when growth is most needed.

“In every new platform there should be one basket. People don’t have to know that there are international festivals, books, borders and films – and they don’t have to do much to buy tickets. We have to make it easy for people to come to all the festivals.”

Lankester said the edge app allows ticket buyers to specify the type of show or genres they want, and using their previous choices, it creates shows for them using an AI-powered algorithm similar to Spotify or Amazon.

Anticipating concerns from small producers or new theater companies that the program would favor large venues, he insisted that the plan focus on shows, not venues or large producers.

“This does not mean making the rich richer and the poor poorer,” he said. “Everyone needs to be careful, whether you’re coming out in public or playing in a church hall.”

At the same time, the fringe will also produce a fixed schedule in which festivalgoers can ask the algorithm to prepare the entire schedule of events once they know what shows they want to see.

Currently, many festivals have free ticket gates and publish separate programs; This year’s A4 program is 416 pages long, about 2cm thick and weighs 615g.