Putting Event Tickets on Sale? Start With the Basics

EVENT PLANNING GUIDE

Putting Event Tickets on Sale? Start With the Basics

Updated on September 29, 2026 | Written by Rachella Thomas

Putting tickets on sale is one of those moments when an event suddenly becomes very real.

Until then, most of the work happens behind the scenes. You've been working through budgets, sites, suppliers, programming and all the other pieces that go into getting an event off the ground. You’ve adapted and changed as you discovered things and made decisions. The fine details of the event have probably shifted and changed a thousand times along the way.

Then you put tickets on sale, and the event suddenly becomes very public.

People can find it. They can start judging it. They hopefully start buying it. When tickets go on sale, your attendance numbers start becoming real rather than hypothetical, and your ticket sales start feeding information back into the planning.

There’s no turning back.

So before you hit publish, you want to be comfortable with three things: what you're selling, how many you can sell and whether the numbers actually work.

My Thoughts on Ticketing

I’ve mentored event planners for years, and the same ticketing questions come up year after year. Inexperienced event planners leap ahead without enough pause and thought. So I’ve decided to do a little brain dump of my thoughts on ticketing.

If you’re putting event tickets on sale soon, consider these basics:

• Your capacity needs to come from the event you're planning, not the number of tickets you'd like to sell. That means being realistic about site capacity, programming capacity, and appeal to your target audience.

• Ticket holders don’t make up the total onsite capacity. Your artists, crew, suppliers, volunteers, stallholders, sponsors, and guests all need to be accounted for in your overall site capacity too. That means not everyone on site or in the venue will be a paying customer.

• A sold-out festival can still lose money, so work backwards when calculating on the ticket price. What does the event cost to produce? What other income do you have coming in? How many tickets do you realistically expect to sell? What does that make each ticket worth? Will your target audience want to pay that amount?

• And then there's the ticket itself. Keep the structure as simple as you can. If you have General Admission, Early Bird, VIP, Weekend, Saturday, Sunday, Family, Child, and Concession tickets, make sure each category has a genuine reason. Don’t overcomplicate your ticketing structure just to appear like a large-scale professional event. Every option you add is another decision you're asking your customer to make and another thing your team has to administer.

• Once you've sorted those fundamentals, use a reputable ticketing platform that can handle the boring technical stuff. I've partnered with Eventbrite many times as an event organiser, and now we also work together to help event planners access useful knowledge and resources. Their platform gives you a straightforward way to list your festival, sell tickets, and manage registrations without building that infrastructure yourself.

• Don’t get bogged down by the ticketing process. Lock it in, and let the platform handle the day-to-day admin so you can focus on reports and sales progress. Keep an eye on engagement and sales performance, but choose a platform that doesn’t require constant troubleshooting.

• The main thing to remember is this:

  Once your tickets go on sale, pay attention to what the numbers are telling you.

  Ticket sales aren't just revenue. They're one of your first real indicators of how the audience is responding to the festival, and that information can help shape your marketing, staffing, infrastructure and other planning decisions as the event gets closer.

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Want More Event Ticketing Advice?

Part of being an experienced event planner is knowing when to bring in people who know more about something than you do. I've spent my career producing events, but I'm not a ticketing specialist. That’s a task I know is best delegated. I’ll stick to helping you plan the event. I’ll let the ticketing experts help you sell the tickets.

I've worked with Eventbrite many times as an event organiser, and when it comes to the finer details of selling and marketing tickets online, I'm happy to leave that advice to the people who do it every day.

If you want to dig deeper, they've put together some genuinely useful free resources:

→ Event Marketing Playbook
For new organisers working out how to promote an event and start building an audience.

→ Guide to Selling Tickets Online
A practical starting point if you're launching your first paid event and want to understand the ticketing side in more detail.

→ 10-Step Guide to Starting a Festival

A guide that takes you further into areas including budgets, staffing, marketing and ticketing, and is well worth having open alongside your own festival plan.

→ If you found this useful, feel free to share it with a fellow event planner or your event network. They’ll appreciate you passing it on.

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Meet Your Mentor

Rachella Thomas is an award-winning event producer with more than 26 years of experience delivering major events. Her work includes the Australian Open, Commonwealth Games Queen’s Baton Relay, Melbourne Food & Wine Festival, and other renowned large-scale events and festivals.

Rachella founded Event Kit, where she turns decades of professional event know-how into practical tools for event planners worldwide.

Learn More → ABOUT

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