Cheltenham Festivals' Wishlist feature

Cheltenham Festivals programme four festivals a year – the largest of which is the Literature Festival, with over 400 events across 10 days.

That's a lot of events. And a lot of people who are (very) keen to buy tickets for those events.

However, their old website had become a source of frustration for both the Cheltenham Festivals team and their customers. Multiple issues with the online booking process over several festivals had led to a lack of trust.

The team at Cheltenham Festivals were clear – they wanted smart features to make booking easier for customers. But these features had to be robust and reliable. The team couldn't go through another year of on-sales with the same issues they’d had with the previous website.

So, when they commissioned us to build the brand new Cheltenham Festivals website, a key goal was to rebuild that all-important trust with their customers.

Smart purchase path features

The old website had a Wishlist feature. It was intended to allow customers to save their favourite events, and bulk-buy tickets for all of them as soon as booking opened. Great idea!

This feature had so much promise, but it was glitchy and unreliable. Whole Wishlists would disappear – causing a huge amount of frustration for customers.

Glitchiness aside, the concept of a Wishlist is a good one. So, having reviewed the feature with the Cheltenham Festivals team, we decided to keep it as part of the new website.

But we'd totally re-engineer it – this time making sure that Wishlists were robust and reliable.

Clear goals and deliverables

Together we defined a set of goals and deliverables for the new website’s Wishlist feature and a set of limitations. Our goals were:

• A customer’s Wishlist can’t be lost or accidentally deleted
• A customer can review and edit their Wishlist on any device
• A customer can buy tickets for multiple events in one go

It's worth noting that there’s a lot more that a Wishlist feature could do.

But the Cheltenham Festivals team were clear on what was essential for the initial launch, and what can be revisited at a later date.

Technical approach

We split the feature into two solutions:

1. Wishlist: the ability for users to add, remove, and view their saved events
2. Bulk-buy: the ability for users to buy tickets for all their saved events in one go

Wishlist

There are numerous ways that customers could potentially 'favourite' events on the website. We could add a cookie their browser. We could build a 'machine' from scratch. Or we could make use of a third-party tool.

We quickly ruled out using cookies – they can easily be cleared and aren’t transferable across devices. We also ruled out building our own machine to manage the Wishlists, as this would take a considerable amount of time, and require significant ongoing maintenance. We opted to integrate with a third-party solution, and for this we chose open source search engine, Typesense.

Some key features made Typesense stand-out as the best option:

• Reliability
• An excellent and highly flexible API
• Reasonable ongoing costs

Additionally – and importantly – we can take data backups from Typesense. This means, should the system go down or suffer any data loss (highly unlikely, but never say never) we would have backups of every customer's Wishlist.

We're also able to provide reporting for the Cheltenham Festivals team – so they know which events have been saved the most. This information is very useful as it helps the team to make data-led decisions about marketing campaigns in the run-up to an on-sale.

Bulk-buy

One of the challenges for the Cheltenham Festivals team was managing their side of the new website project in tandem with the migration of all their ticketing and CRM functions to Spektrix. They had a lot to learn – and a lot to decide.

It’s helpful in these situations to work with a web agency who know Spektrix really well. (Which we do, having built 40+ Spektrix-integrated websites.)

Our experience and understanding of the system meant we were able to work closely with the team at Spektrix, and support Cheltenham Festivals in getting their events set up so that a Bulk-buy feature would work well.

The Bulk-buy feature uses Spektrix 'Best Available' API endpoint to post tickets to the basket. For customers, this means they can add all of their events to the basket in one go, rather than clicking through each event separately.

There were a number of technical considerations when building this feature. This included the need to stagger API calls, to ensure Spektrix didn’t time-out mass requests.

And building an integration with the Spektrix queue so that, during large on-sales, customers using the Bulk-buy feature would be queued with all other customers.

The results

Cheltenham Festivals’ new website went live in June 2024, with the 2024 Literature Festival going on sale in August.

At peak times there were 6,000+ people on the website – exploring the programme, using the Wishlist, and completing purchases. With the Wishlist and Bulk-buy features successfully providing customers with a simple and reliable way of purchasing large numbers of tickets.

For some context: On the first day of members' on-sale in 2023, 30% of sales that day happened within the first hour. On the first day of members' on-sale 2024, 75% of sales that day happened within the first hour. As Hannah McNally, Head of Marketing & Communications, says, “This suggests a big improvement on the speed at which people were moving through the purchase path.”

In addition to that impressive performance – previous years' on-sales had left the Cheltenham Festivals team dealing with numerous complaints from frustrated customers. Another sure sign of success for the new website – a distinct lack of complaints this year!

What’s next?

An iterative approach to development means we can now build on the success of the new website, and develop new features for end-users.

Following feedback from users, we’ll be looking to enhance the Bulk-buy feature – allowing customers to pick which of their saved events they’d like to buy, and how many tickets for each event.

Planning a new website with ticketing integration? Let's talk – kate@supercooldesign.co.uk