Paléo Festival: meeting technological challenges during peak demand

The Paléo Festival ticket office beats its own record by selling out 180,000 tickets in two and half hours: several minutes after tickets went on sale, crowds of people flocked to ticket sales offices and the Paléo.ch website was taken by storm for online sales.

Thanks to the support of ELCA and the SecuTix technology, Paléo achieved more than 50% of ticket sales through the online ticket-shop on its website In order to manage the high levels of traffic expected at the launch of ticket sales and during "Last Minutes", a system using a "virtual" queue regulates the flow of online users into the electronic ticketing system based on their order of arrival.

On Wednesday, 13 April, several minutes before the announced launch of ticket sales, 16,000 people were already in queue, their eyes glued to the clock counting down to the launch. At 12 p.m. on the dot, there was an explosion in activity, with tickets selling at a rate of 2,000 per minute. Within 15 minutes, Friday night's event was sold out and by 4:30 p.m. only few tickets were still available - and everything was sold out the following day.

One question comes to mind in light of all this: how can so many tickets be sold per minute? Without the unrivalled enthusiasm of French-speaking festival goers, it would not be possible to achieve such a high pace of ticket sales. Moreover, the innovative technological solutions put in place to ensure the agility, availability and performance of Paléo's IT system certainly play an important role in the outcome (see report on Télévision Suisse Romandie in French).