👋 Hey there
Hello and welcome back for the October edition of Event Dispatch.
In this issue: our own data on ticket discounts and the overall effect they have on ticket sales (spoiler: they're less scary than you think), a $100 trick for no-shows, the tactics behind this year's trade show growth, the UK's crackdown on ticket touts, an AI debate with an awkward ending, and PCMA's case for cutting something. Plus, Wil on why a logo on your checkout isn't the same as owning it.
Let's get into it.
📺 Deep Dive: Should You Discount Your Event Tickets? Here's What Our Data Says
Ask organisers about discounting and you'll hear the same worries. It cheapens the brand. It eats the margin. Sales crater the moment it ends. So we checked four years of sales from 227 independent UK organisers, and the fears mostly didn't survive.
Discount days sold 1.8 times as many tickets as a normal day. Over a full year, discounting cost about 2p for every £1 of ticket revenue. That's it. And yet 74% of organisers never ran a single discount between 2022 and 2025.
Keep it short and shallow: The typical discount was about 15% off, running around eight days a year. Think flash sale, not clearance rack.
There's no hangover: Sales in the week after a discount matched the week before. No slump, no sulk.
Timing isn't magic: Early and late discounts performed about the same, so you can stop agonising over the perfect date.
A discount isn't a confession that your event is struggling. It's a tool. Pick it up when sales need a nudge, like a 48-hour flash sale or a code for your mailing list, then put it back down.
Want the numbers behind it? Read the full Eventcube study.
🧠 Event Industry Intel You Need To Know
A $100 Refundable Deposit Cut No-Shows to 10%
Here's a number that'll make anyone running free events wince: 28%. That's how many registrants typically never show up. Skift Meetings dug into PheedLoop data from over 1,070 events, then followed 37signals, the company behind Basecamp, as it tried something bolder.
The trick? Charge everyone $100 to register. Hand it back, in cash, when they walk through the door.
Photo Credit: BaseCamp had a stack of $100 bills on hand during its latest gathering. envato
Key insights from the report:
Free events leak the most: The median no-show rate was 28% for free events, against 17% for paid ones.
Fewer sign-ups, fuller room: 37signals' last free event turned 84 registrations into 38 attendees. With the deposit, only 55 signed up, but 50 of them came.
The amount barely matters: Event psychology advisor Victoria Matey says it's the act of paying that signals commitment, not the size of the number.
"It costs you money not to be there." - Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO, 37signals
Read that again: fewer registrations, more people in the room. If you run free events, your registration count is a hopeful guess, not a headcount. A refundable deposit turns a lazy click into a small promise. It's trickier when employers pay, and it can shut out people short on cash, so test it once first. Call it the flip side of our discount data: a price, even one you give back, changes behaviour.
Thinking about trying it? Skift Meetings has the full breakdown, caveats and all.
Five Tactics That Grew Trade Show Attendance in 2026
Everyone makes predictions. Hardly anyone checks them. Trade Show Executive did, going back to the five attendee tactics it tipped in March to see which paid off.
Key insights from the report:
Personal beats general: OFC grew attendance 22% year on year by tailoring its messages to the jobs its most valuable attendees actually do.
Friends sell tickets: Peer referral tools averaged a 31.9% share-to-registration rate, according to TSE's February Tech Trek report. Roughly one in three shares became a sign-up.
Listening pays off: The National Restaurant Association Show noticed education emails were opening at over 40%, leaned hard into those topics, and tripled its registration conversions.
The best part? None of this needs a bigger budget. Split your list by job title. Make it easy for attendees to drag a colleague along. Look at which emails people actually open, then write more of those. Radical, we know.
Planning next year's campaign? Trade Show Executive walks through all five.
From the Founder's Desk: A Logo on the Checkout Isn't White-Label
Here's something that happens more than it should. An organiser signs up for a "white-label" ticketing platform, uploads their logo, picks their brand colours and calls it done. Then a customer hits checkout and lands on someone else's domain, with someone else's name on the receipt.
Wil Troup has spent over a decade building ticketing for the likes of TEDx, Volkswagen and Red Bull, and he's blunt: a logo on the page isn't white-label. In his latest LinkedIn piece, he compares Eventcube, TicketSpice and TicketLeap, with six questions to ask any provider. The short version: whose domain is the checkout on, who holds the data, and when does the money land?
To be fair, not every event needs that much control, and Wil says so. For a one-off workshop, fast setup and a low per-ticket fee might be plenty. TicketSpice shines at flexible pages and timed entry. TicketLeap is quick and simple for smaller events.
But if events are becoming a permanent part of your business, buy for where you're headed. "A short-term launch requirement can be solved by almost any ticketing product," he writes. The hard part is picking the platform you'll still want in two years.
Join the conversation on LinkedIn and tell Wil which of his six questions your current platform would fail.
The UK Is Drafting Its Ban on Ticket Touting
£5,899. That's what one Viagogo listing wanted for a Mica Millar gig at New Century in Manchester, a 19,728% mark-up. The Guardian reports the government now has a dedicated team writing the law to stop it, with draft legislation due this parliamentary session.
Key insights from the report:
A few touts, a lot of listings: FanFair Alliance looked at 300 events across 13 venues and found just three touts, based in Latvia, North America and Germany, behind more than 75% of the listings.
Fans are already paying: O2 estimates fans lost £60m to touts between the policy being announced and April this year, with mark-ups of up to 1,000%.
Artists are piling in: Tinie Tempah says tickets are being "siphoned away by people who contribute nothing to live music but are happy to profit from it."
For UK organisers, this is mostly good news: fewer silly listings, fewer heartbroken fans at the door holding a fake. The catch, which officials are already weighing, is touts moving offshore or onto social media. Get ahead of it: offer an official face-value resale or exchange, and tell fans loudly that it's the only safe way to buy second-hand.
Selling tickets in the UK? The Guardian has the full story.
🎤 Featured Voice: Peter Bordes on Why AI Starts at the Top
Put an AI optimist and an AI sceptic on one stage and you get Skift Meetings Forum's AI Scorecard. In one corner: Peter Bordes, who runs events and experiences at Circle Internet Financial and thinks AI is already making events better. In the other: Freeman's Kedar Deshpande, arguing it's mostly the same event, just faster.
Watch the full interview on YouTube
"The example has to be set by leadership, not just dictated by leadership."
Bordes brought receipts. For client dinners, his team asks guests to name two or three people they'd love at the table. AI then finds 10 to 12 more companies that would make the evening worth everyone's time. And before a single staff member got an AI login, Circle did its legal and technical homework. That's the leadership bit: go first, and go carefully.
Now the uncomfortable part. Bordes reckons agentic AI, tools that take action on their own, will arrive in "two to three years, not five." When it does, event teams will be asked to justify headcount against what the software can do. Better to have that conversation on your terms now than on finance's terms later.
Which side are you on? Skift Meetings has both arguments from the AI Scorecard.
PCMA's Advice for Better Events: Cut Something
Most conference advice boils down to "add more". At PCMA Convening EMEA in Lisbon, with 814 participants from 42 countries, the message was the opposite. As PCMA president and CEO Sherrif Karamat put it: "More is never better." micebook rounded up the five biggest takeaways.
Key insights from the report:
Connection needs a plan: Networking doesn't just happen, so PCMA built it in with formats like Micro Labs, Connection Starters and Exploration Tours.
Rest helps people think: Neuropsychologist Elke Geraerts argued that downtime and reflection sharpen attendees, while nonstop activity wears them out.
Data isn't insight: Teams and budgets are shrinking, and plenty of organisations are sitting on piles of data without the right data, or the know-how to use it.
"The most powerful thing that you can do for your next event is have the courage to remove something." - Elke Geraerts, CEO, Better Minds
Try it on your next agenda. Find the session nobody would miss if it vanished. Replace it with open time or a hosted introduction. Nobody ever flew home raving about the fifth panel of the afternoon.
Heading to a conference this autumn? micebook has all five takeaways from Lisbon.
Until Next Time!
That wraps up this edition of Event Dispatch. Discounts, deposits, shorter agendas: the stories kept landing in the same place. People show up for what they value, and more is rarely the same as better.
Tried a deposit for a free event? Cut a session and nobody noticed? Hit reply and tell us.
Here's to fewer no-shows and fuller rooms. 🥂
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