A lot of venues sell a ticket online, and that is the end of the transaction. Parking, merch, drinks and VIP upgrades get sold on the night, or not at all. The guest weighs a twenty-deep merch line against their spot on the floor, and most of the time the shirt loses.
The same guest was in a very different position a few weeks earlier. They had already committed to the show, they were mid-payment, and their card was out. That is the highest-intent moment a venue gets with a buyer all cycle, and most checkouts use it to sell one thing.
Ticket Add-ons put those extra items inside the checkout. Anything a guest would buy on the night can be attached to the order in advance: parking passes, tour bundles, drink packages, early entry, coat check, afterparty access. If it has a price, it can be sold with the ticket.
The effect on order value is easy to see. A $45 ticket to a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Theatre closes at $45. Add a $15 parking pass and a $25 shirt to a third of those orders and the venue takes in roughly $20,000 extra across a 1,500-ticket night, without finding a new audience or spending more on marketing.
Add-on sales also tell you what the night looks like before doors open. Merch gets printed to the order count instead of guessed at, so unsold stock stops sitting in a storage room. Parking and F&B get staffed to known volumes rather than an estimate made on the afternoon of the show. And at a room like the Vogue Theatre, the Add-on money lands weeks ahead of the invoices the show still has to pay.
At Adelaide Hall in Toronto, one of The MRG Group’s own rooms, parking is pre-paid at checkout instead of contested on the street, tour bundles are sold with the ticket and collected at a pickup window, and ticket, parking and merch all sit on a single QR code at the door. Nobody queues twice.
Our new whitepaper, Ticket Add-ons turn one ticket into a bigger sale, goes through what venues sell as Add-ons, why checkout beats the night for those sales, and what the AOV lift pays across a full room.
Download the whitepaper below.
