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Festicket - The Festival Survey interview with CEO Zack Sabban
Other | Monday 10th March 2014 | Osh
Europe's largest music festival website Festicket have recently conducted a survey on International Music Trends. With the festival season drawing quickly upon us, it was the perfect time to catch up with CEO Zack Sabban on their findings.
Hey Zack, firstly can you tell us a bit about the whole concept of Festicket?
Very simply, Festicket is designed to make booking trips to festivals hassle-free while saving you money. We work with 200 of the world’s best music festivals and hundreds of travel and accommodation providers to ensure we provide the best possible value, while providing expert-curated packages to make sure that your festival experience is the best possible!
With festivals increasing more than ever, and different websites and companies expanding. What gives you the edge over your competition?
We’re slightly different from most other websites out there in that there really aren’t any that offer the range of festivals that we’re able to. But we don’t just muddle our packages together, we work very closely with the festivals themselves to ensure that our packages offer something unique and fit their audience. So festival goers can be assured that the festival themselves have not only given us their seal of approval, but in many cases are very involved in what we offer. From a festival goer’s perspective, hopefully this helps them experience their festivals in the best way and we’ve seen that it keeps them coming back for more and trying new festivals each time. We’ve also worked very hard to establish fantastic relationships with festivals that mean that they’ve benefited from our growing network of festival goers, which is particularly important for many festival organisers when they’re looking to raise awareness of their events internationally.
You have recently conducted a survey on International Music Trends. Can you tell us about this and what the key findings were from your results?
We undertook this survey because we’ve grown so quickly that we’ve not had much of a chance to take a step back and learn a little more about our customers and members. We now have over 200,000 members, so it’s important that we know more about their backgrounds, their habits and most importantly, what they look for when going to festivals. After we ran our survey, we found that there were some really interesting points about international travel that both the festival and travel worlds would find useful. Festicket is unique in that we sit right in the middle of these two sectors so hopefully the data we have is useful. We were surprised by how many of our members had never been to a festival before – around 25%. Of course pretty much all of them intend to go to one in 2014. We were also very pleasantly surprised by the number – 95% - who would be looking for packages rather than to book each element of their trip separately. But then why would anyone want to have the hassle of doing it separately when booking in one go doesn’t cost them any more?
Was there a big difference between the UK and the rest of the world?
We already had an inkling that the UK would throw up some differences compared the rest of the world, which was why we separated it out, but were expecting UK festival going habits, including going abroad, to be a little more in line with everyone else. It turns out that 40% of festival goers overall have been to a festival abroad, but this is only 30% for the UK. However, on the other hand we didn’t expect that 40% of UK festival goers would have stayed in a hotel or apartment for festivals they attended in 2013. This was much higher than we thought but still much lower than the 55% of festival goers from the rest of the world who had done the same.
Croatia was the most popular destination last year for all festival goers. Was this a surprise finding?
This was definitely one we weren’t surprised about. Croatia has just exploded in recent years and it seems like new festivals are popping up every year. The country boasts amazing coastline, Mediterranean weather and cheaper prices, while being pretty accessible, so we don’t see this changing dramatically any time soon. That’s not to say that other countries can’t boast all of this and more too though!
What festivals are you personally looking forward to this year?
Ultra Europe looks incredible and is proving very popular right now. If you’re into your electronic music, which I am, and want to see the very biggest names while spending your days at boat parties and exploring the old city of Split then this is going to be epic. There’s going to be a fight in the Festicket office when it comes to figuring out who gets to go! A complete contrast to that would be Latitude in the UK, which I’m personally looking forward to. I love the contrast between the big named bands and the a-list arts and comedy acts. They do a really good job of mixing things up each year too so I’m sure there will be a few surprises thrown in.
What is the craziest festival you’ve ever been to?
Kazantip Republic which is in the Ukraine, but don’t dare call it a ‘festival’! You get in with a “ViZa” which, if you manage to find an old fashioned suitcase and paint it yellow, you can get for free - but only if you carry that suitcase around with you for the entirety of your stay. The Republic has its own “PreZident” and ministers, customs, constitution and everything else that a functional, but completely barmy, country needs. It last for two weeks and attracts some incredible DJs. It’s really unique, has an insane vibe and takes place on the beach of the Crimea which is absolutely beautiful.
What does the future have in store for Festicket?
We want to be the defacto place to go when you’re looking to go to a festival so the first thing is to get more festivals! We offered around 80 last year, mostly in Europe, and are looking good to work with around 250 in 2014. The main thing is that we want to work with great festivals all over the world, so expect to see more in the North and South America, Asia, Australasia and anywhere else that they put on incredible festivals.
Check out the full survey here - www.festicket.com
http://festicket.com/media/press/downloads/Festicket-Infographics-final__-FINAL.pdf
Words by @tiptoptab
