Most fest teams open ticket sales before they have decided what they are selling, and spend the next three weeks patching the consequences. The decisions below are in the order that actually works, because each one constrains the next.
1. Decide the pass structure first
Before prices, before the payment gateway, before anything: write down every distinct thing a student can buy. For most fests that is a short list.
- Season pass — all days, the default for your own students.
- Day pass — one day, mostly for outside colleges and for the headliner day.
- Pro night / headliner — often priced separately, often the only thing a large share of buyers want.
- Event registration — competitions and workshops, usually free or cheap, often with a team size.
- Add-ons — merchandise, accommodation, food coupons.
The thing that breaks systems later is team registration. A dance competition with teams of six is not one registration with a quantity of six; it is one entry with six named people, some of whom also need passes. Decide early whether a team registration includes entry to the fest or requires each member to hold a pass separately. Getting this wrong produces a queue at the gate on day one.
Cap what has a room
Anything held in a room needs a hard limit set at the point of sale, not tracked in a sheet afterwards. Set it at roughly eighty percent of seats for free events, since attendance runs below registration, and at capacity for paid ones.
2. Decide what you collect
Every field you ask for costs you completions. Ask only for what you will genuinely use:
- Name and phone number — you need these at the gate and for last-minute changes.
- Email — the ticket goes here.
- College — you need it if you price internal and external students differently.
- College ID — only if you are actually going to check it. If nobody verifies it, do not ask for it.
You are collecting personal data from minors in some cases, so say plainly what it is for and do not keep it longer than the fest needs it.
3. Set up payments properly
In India that means UPI first — it will be the overwhelming majority of what you take — plus cards and netbanking for the rest. A few things organisers learn the hard way:
- Know your fee before you set prices. A platform fee and a payment gateway fee are not the same thing, and some providers quote one while charging both.
- Know your settlement date. Money does not arrive instantly. If you owe a sound vendor on Monday and settlement lands Wednesday, that is a problem you want to find in week one, not fest week.
- Decide the refund position and publish it. "No refunds" is a legitimate policy. Having no stated policy is not, and it will cost you a day of arguments.
- Failed payments are not fraud. A meaningful share of UPI attempts fail and retry. If your system creates a pass on attempt rather than on confirmation, you will issue duplicates.
Stop taking cash if you can
A desk outside the canteen taking cash feels like it widens access. What it actually does is create the one part of your accounts that cannot be reconciled. If you must run one, issue from the same system so the sale still produces a record, and have exactly one named person responsible for the float.
4. Deliver the ticket in a form the gate can read
The ticket should reach the buyer by email within seconds of the payment clearing, and it should carry a scannable code. Not a reference number a volunteer has to type, and not a PDF that only opens on wifi.
Assume students will arrive with a screenshot, with low battery, and with no signal because twelve thousand people are standing in the same field. That means the code must work offline once it is on the screen, and your gate app must be able to verify without a perfect connection.
5. Plan the gate before you plan the sale
Check-in throughput is what students actually experience, and it is set by arithmetic you can do in advance. A volunteer reading names off a printed list manages roughly six to ten people a minute. A volunteer scanning a code manages thirty or more.
Take your expected peak — usually the hour before the headliner, and it is far spikier than teams expect — and divide. If four thousand people will arrive in an hour and one scanner clears thirty a minute, you need at least three lanes, and you should build four.
Also decide in advance:
- what happens when a code has already been scanned, which will happen;
- whether a season pass re-enters the venue on the same day;
- who is allowed to override a rejected ticket, and who is not.
6. Open sales in phases
Do not open everything at once. Open the season pass to your own college first. It is the simplest product, your own students are the most forgiving audience, and it surfaces the problems in your flow while the volume is small enough to fix them by hand.
Then open day passes and external sales, then event registrations. By the time you are handling team registrations from other colleges, the payment path has already been tested by a few hundred real people.
The short version
- Write down every distinct thing someone can buy, including team events.
- Cap anything with a room, at the point of sale.
- Ask for the fewest fields you will actually use.
- Know your real fee and your settlement date before you price.
- Issue on payment confirmation, never on payment attempt.
- Send a scannable ticket that works offline.
- Do the gate arithmetic, then add a lane.
- Open to your own college first.