Maximizing Door Revenue

In live events, the door marks the beginning of the guest experience - and the first transaction of the night for the venue. It's often the highest-traffic, highest-friction moment of the evening. Patrons are excited and ready to pay to get in, which makes this moment one of the venue's biggest opportunities for incremental revenue and data collection. Unfortunately, many venues do not capitalize on this opportunity.

Traditionally, operators have relied on granting guests access by charging cash, or using a handheld device. This breaks down in a few specific ways:

• No data is collected. The venue doesn't know whether this is a first-time guest or a repeat customer with high spending propensity, and has no way to retarget them later.
• There's no way to upsell willing customers. Many guests would pay a premium to skip the line, and have no mechanism to do so.
• Cash is difficult to track, and exposes venues to theft and inaccurate accounting.
• Multiple check-in methods - a handheld device for some guests, counting change for others, scanning pre-sold tickets for others still - slow the doorman down and create bottlenecks exactly when the line is longest.

Speakeasy was built to close these exact gaps. Its digital box office and skip-line features allow a venue to turn walk-ups into first-party data, increase incremental revenue by letting patrons pay a premium for expedited entry, and turn every personal device into a POS system able to take payment in seconds.

At a 350-capacity venue in Chicago's West Loop, Speakeasy's implementation team reconfigured the venue's technology stack onto its all-in-one platform - replacing the handheld devices and cash reconciliation with Speakeasy's phone-based POS and skip-line feature. The result: a 36.8% fiscal-year increase in walk-up revenue, and a 34.3% annual reduction in software and hardware spend from replacing multiple point-solutions with one system.

When it comes to data capture, a high-volume venue in Miami captured 60,000+ new consumer data points at the door after switching to Speakeasy's QR-based box office - data that, under a cash-and-handheld model, would never have existed.

Operators notice the difference quickly:

"Our nightclubs and dayclubs have been using the Speakeasy mobile payment solution for onsite admission, and both our internal teams and our guests absolutely love it. The platform has significantly accelerated the payment and entry process, creating a smoother, faster, and more modern front-door admission experience for our venues." - Director, Ticketing & Support Services, TAO Group Hospitality