Conference Ticketing and Check-in

The organiser was paying a ticketing service for an experience it didn’t control. It runs conferences and trade shows across the Netherlands and Belgium, and sold tickets through a third-party service that charged a fee on every ticket and kept attendee data in its own system.

Custom tickets were awkward: early bird prices, group rates, partner codes, and exhibitor, speaker and press passes. Companies wanted proper VAT invoices and to pay by transfer. At the door, check-in slowed whenever the venue Wi-Fi struggled, badges were printed in advance and many went unused, and the team answered the same questions about the agenda, parking and the venue by email for weeks before every event.

We walked through the organiser’s last event with the team, from the first ticket sold to the last badge collected.

• The first hour decides the day. Most attendees arrive in the same short window, and every second at the door counts.
• Venue Wi-Fi can’t be trusted on a full morning, when thousands of phones join at once.
• Pre-printed badges waste paper and time, and people who registered late are always missing from the boxes.
• Companies buy the most tickets, and they need invoices that their finance teams accept first time.

Each event on the platform has the ticket types the organiser wants, each with its own rules:

• early bird prices that end on a date or after a set number of tickets;
• group tickets with a lower price per person;
• student tickets that ask for proof;
• partner codes that unlock a discount or a hidden ticket type;
• exhibitor, speaker and press passes, issued free after approval;
• multi-day tickets, day passes, and workshops with their own capacity.

Attendees can transfer a ticket to a colleague, and the organiser’s refund policy is applied automatically up to the deadline.

Attendees pay by iDEAL, card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Bancontact for visitors from Belgium. Companies enter their details and VAT number, which is checked, and receive a proper VAT invoice. Businesses elsewhere in the EU are invoiced under the reverse-charge rules. Companies can choose to pay by bank transfer, and their tickets are issued as soon as the payment arrives.

Tickets arrive as Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes, each with a unique, signed QR code, so attendees open them in one tap at the door.

At the venue, staff use a check-in app on their own phones. Before doors open, it downloads the attendee list, so scanning keeps going even when the venue Wi-Fi doesn’t. Each scan takes under a second. Phones sync check-ins with each other when the connection returns, and a ticket used twice at different entrances is flagged.

Badges print on demand as each attendee checks in, with their name, company and a colour for their ticket type, so only people who actually arrive get one, including those who registered that morning.

Exhibitors scan attendees’ badges on their stands, with the attendee’s agreement, and add notes as they talk. Their leads are ready to download after the event, and attendees can see which exhibitors they shared their details with.

An AI assistant answers attendees’ questions on the event website and by email, in English and Dutch: the agenda, speakers, rooms, venue, travel and parking, accessibility and tickets. It answers only from the organiser’s own event information, and when it isn’t sure, it passes the question to the team’s inbox with the conversation attached. The team now answers the questions that need a person.

The ticket shop and organiser dashboard are Next.js in TypeScript on Vercel, with Supabase and PostgreSQL holding events, tickets and check-ins. Stripe handles every payment method and the bank transfer flow. The check-in app is built in Flutter and works offline. Wallet tickets are issued for Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, and the assistant runs on OpenAI models over the organiser’s event information.

All data is hosted in the EU. Attendees give clear consent for marketing and for sharing their details with exhibitors, only the data each event needs is collected, and it is deleted on a set schedule after the event.

Before the first event, we rehearsed doors opening in full, with staff, badge printers, the venue’s own Wi-Fi switched off, and a crowd of test tickets. The team’s notes from the first event shaped the next release, and every event since has run on the platform.

The organiser now sells tickets on its own site and keeps its relationship with attendees. New events and ticket types are set up in minutes, companies get invoices their finance teams accept, check-in keeps moving when the Wi-Fi doesn’t, badges are printed only for people who arrive, and the team’s inbox is no longer full of the same questions.