Edinburgh’s eleven festivals are trying to build a single ticketing platform so you don’t have to work out which festival is which just to buy a ticket. Nearly four million tickets were sold across all eleven events in 2024, and right now buying them means navigating separate websites, separate box offices, separate programmes, and separate payment systems for what most visitors think of as one big festival.
The problem is that while everybody agrees ticketing is broken, three different groups are building three different solutions at the same time.
What’s actually happening
The unified box office plan. The directors of all eleven festivals, including the Edinburgh International Festival, the Book Festival and the Film Festival, are about to invite bidders to investigate merging their ticketing operations and customer data into a single platform. The goal is a year-round app where you put tickets from multiple festivals into one basket and check out once.
Francesca Hegyi, executive director of the International Festival, put it plainly: people shouldn’t need to know that there are separate international, book, fringe and film festivals just to buy a ticket.
The festivals also want a major corporate sponsor, potentially someone like Mastercard, to back the platform and offset the public funding cuts they’re expecting over the next few years.
The Fringe Society’s own app. Tony Lankester, the Fringe’s chief executive, has jumped ahead of the joint plan by building a prototype app himself. He designed it at home using the AI coding tool Claude, and the Fringe Society is piloting a beta version with a thousand festival-goers this August.
The app would use an AI-powered recommendation algorithm, similar to Spotify or Amazon, to suggest shows based on your previous choices and preferences. It would also include an automated planning tool that plots a full diary of events once you tell it which shows you want to see.
The venue consortium’s zero-commission platform. And then, just days ago, a group of major Fringe venues including Underbelly, Assembly, Gilded Balloon and the Pleasance announced their own rival, a platform called Love The Fringe and Edfest.com that removes commission on ticket sales entirely. Their argument is that performers are already financially squeezed and shouldn’t be losing a cut of every ticket on top of everything else.
So there are now three separate ticketing initiatives running in parallel for what is, from the audience’s perspective, a single summer of events.
Why this is happening now
Money. Several pressures are landing at once.
- Scottish government funding is tightening. Ministers pledged £200m over three years for Scotland’s arts sector after an earlier crisis, and gave the Fringe £1m over two years for digital development. But the Scottish government now needs to save roughly £5bn in overall spending by 2030, and culture is an unprotected budget line.
- Edinburgh is now the most expensive hotel city in Europe. The Post Office’s city costs barometer found that in June, Edinburgh hotel prices beat London, Venice, Paris and Barcelona. Overall, it’s the third most expensive European city behind Oslo and Copenhagen.
- A new 5% visitors’ levy on hotel beds has just been introduced, adding another cost layer for festival-goers.
- Rising costs are already reducing ticket sales and cutting the number of producers who travel to Edinburgh to scout new shows, according to Lankester.
The festivals collectively represent a half-a-billion-pound industry for Edinburgh. Hegyi has floated the idea of growing that to a billion over the next decade through a public-private partnership, but that requires the kind of unified infrastructure none of them currently have.
The data question underneath all of this
The less-reported part of this story is the customer data. Lankester described the festivals as sitting on a vast “data lake” of ticket-buying behaviour, preferences and audience demographics that isn’t being properly used.
A unified platform would pool that data across all eleven festivals. That’s commercially powerful, it’s what would attract a corporate sponsor, and it’s also what makes some festival directors cautious. Sharing customer data means sharing commercial intelligence, and not everyone is ready to do that.
The other festivals agree with the principle but want more technical and commercial analysis before they commit to pooling their ticketing operations and their data. Talks are ongoing with VisitScotland, Creative Scotland and Edinburgh City Council.
The numbers worth knowing
- 11 festivals involved in the unified plan
- Nearly 4 million tickets sold across all festivals in 2024
- £500 million — estimated annual economic value of Edinburgh’s festivals
- £200 million — Scottish government arts pledge over three years
- £5 billion — savings the Scottish government needs to find by 2030
- £1 million — Fringe’s digital development funding over two years
- 1,000 beta testers for the Fringe app this August
- 416 pages, 615 grams — the physical weight of this year’s A4 Fringe programme
The Fringe runs 7 to 31 August. The International Festival runs 7 to 30 August. Whether any of the three ticketing systems will be ready for this summer is another question entirely.
Brian Cox, the Succession actor, called for a unified box office during an arts panel discussion last year and said one was “desperately needed.” He was right about the need. The question now is whether eleven festivals, a venue consortium, and a CEO with an AI prototype can agree on whose version of “unified” actually wins.