They had a monthly plan which made me nervous at first but then they didn’t add anything to the ticket. Or they didn’t cater for European organisers, or they wanted all the money up front and paid you after the event, or they seemed okay but then the design on their ticketing widget to be embedded on the website was just terrible and didn’t inspire any confidence on the part of customers – the one thing I needed them to do!

I searched around for alternatives and spent 2 full days signing up to the likes of Eventbee, Eventzilla, Ticketbud, Zapevent and a whole bunch of other absurdly-named ticketing websites (hard to find a good name these days that’s available, I guess) and one after the other let me down. And what were they doing for me anyway apart from the nice ticket widget? Over time however Eventbrite kept increasing their fees until it wasn’t just a few bucks per ticket extra the customer had to pay but 15-25 bucks more each time! That made my retreats seem quite a bit more expensive. If I’d just put my own bank details on the page it might have occurred to them that anyone can put up a website and maybe the retreat didn’t even exist…but when they saw the Eventbrite widget with its corporate branding it promised a certain kind of trust. I was running a retreat, not a night club party.īut it gave people confidence. I didn’t need their databases, their QR codes, their automated emails – I just wanted people to buy their ticket and turn up.

It wasn’t for all their event management tools.

Why even use a third party ticketing website? All in all it seemed like a good deal at the time. It was easy to use, the ticket widget looked nice on my booking page and they took an extra few bucks on each ticket sold. I’ve been running a retreat in Morocco for years and as a European organiser the only ticketing solution I found that seemed to fit was Eventbrite.

Similar to eventbrite