The Binghamton University Student Association has launched a new website, www.bingtickets.com, which the SA Executive Board says will improve the ticket-purchasing process for student-run events.
Student groups can request to begin using the ticketing site as early as next week.
Catherine Cornell, the SA vice president for programming, said the idea of creating a website where student groups can sell tickets online to their own events has long been a topic of discussion among previous years’ E-Boards. This semester is the first time this idea has been implemented. The website launched about two weeks ago.
Cornell claimed the website would expedite the ticket-selling process by offering an online, fast and easy means of purchase.
“You can buy the ticket, keep it in your email and maybe right before you go to the show, you print it out, pick it up at a PODS station and then go right there, and then the people running the event can scan it at the door,” Cornell said.
Cornell said that student groups on campus will also benefit from the online ticketing service because the groups will no longer have to print their own SA Box Office tickets, a process that Cornell characterized as a hassle because it forces a member of the student group to front the money for the tickets.
The new website was funded through monies taken from the same “student activity fee” — $92.50 that all students must pay each semester — which provides all the revenue in the SA’s budget. But Cornell said start-up costs for the site were minimal, partly because Matt Soriano, a former treasurer of the SA Programming Board and recent BU graduate, designed most of the website.
The SA must also pay a yearly subscription fee to run the website. Cornell couldn’t specify the fee’s exact cost, but said it was also “very cheap.” She noted that the website will not divert funds from other SA-funded services because its expenses are drawn from surplus student activity fee funds not allocated for other projects or uses.
Michael Majewski, manager of the Anderson Center’s Box Office, said that the Anderson Center, which already sells tickets to shows through the website www.tickets.com, would “probably not” switch over to selling tickets through www.bingtickets.com for official Anderson Center events. Cornell said that tickets for events hosted by SAPB and student groups at the Anderson Center will be sold through www.bingtickets.com.
Tickets for major shows at the Events Center will still be sold through the Events Center’s box office, according to Cornell, because of a contractual agreement between the SA, the Events Center and the athletics department.
Some student group leaders expressed excitement about the SA’s new ticketing website.
Michael Galarraga, president of Binghamton Bhangra, an Indian dance group, said that he hoped it could make accounting for his group’s ticket sales easier.
“When you’re having an event and you’re selling tickets, you give everyone on the team a certain number of tickets to sell,” Galarraga said. “When you do that, sometimes money goes missing, and since you guys are a team, you don’t really want to blame the other. It just causes a lot of internal issues.”
Sammi Eilenberg, a senior majoring in psychology, called the website “a great idea.”
“I’ve gone to events before and I had to wait for like an hour on line so if we were able go on the Internet and get tickets that would be so much easier,” Eilenberg said. “A lot more people would get tickets.”