Punchestown Racecourse is regarded as the ‘Home’ of Irish national hunt horseracing, attracting over 200,000 visitors per annum including the prestigious five-day Festival each spring.

Before joining the Future Ticketing family, Punchestown had traditionally been a ‘cash’ event with little or no online sales.

As well as creating challenges for advance sales, this regularly caused security, accountability and fraud issues.

Future Ticketing helped Punchestown with the digital transformation of their ticketing. Code was embedded on the website providing a branded, proprietary customer journey, where the customer is never re-directed to a third-party site, and instead stays on the Punchestown website. Additionally, Future Ticketing’s open API allowed Punchestown to integrate software including payment gateways, analysis and third party retail allowing a 360 degree view of their customers which could be easily monitored and inform future business decisions.

Punchestown now sell over 90% of their total ticket sales through the online booking engine, using up to 100 different ticket types spread across general admission, packages, boxholders, stakeholders, sponsors and corporate hospitality.

On event days the Future Ticketing reporting system allows management to view complete live redemption data directly on their mobile devices, allowing for efficient and effective management of staffing, hospitality facilities, restaurants and bars.

Live data can also be made available to Statutory Authorities to improve traffic management, safety and security helping to reduce third party costs. 

Utilising the functionality available from Future Ticketing, Punchestown has been able to grow group bookings and bundle packages exponentially.

Since they have started using the Future Ticketing suite of tools available, they have been particularly successful in converting new younger customers and families to their annual race meetings.

In 2022 as the Festival began in April, 100% of hospitality had  been sold, the advance tickets ticket sales were up on previous years, and they were on track to reach pre-pandemic numbers across the event.