How to Find Tickets

Learn how to find the right ticket for your festival experience.

Written by George Reese

Last published at: April 25th, 2023

Most festivals require tickets to attend both online and in-person events. If your festival does not require tickets, you can simply browse the online events and selections and watch whatever you like. If, on the other hand, your festival requires tickets, this document explains how to purchase, transfer, claim, and use tickets with your festival.

Some Festivals May Use Alternative Ticketing

This document applies only to festivals not requiring tickets or festivals using the ticketing system built into the SparqFest platform. If the festival site does not describe ticketing, they are either not requiring tickets or using a third-party ticketing service (possibly including box-office ticketing). If you do not see a ticketing option on the festival site, check with the festival itself.

 

If the festival you are attending requires tickets for any event and they are using SparqFest for ticketing, a “Tickets” menu item will appear on the festival page. You can browse available tickets and make a purchase directly from this page.

Another approach, however, is to find the event you wish to attend or the selection you wish to watch on the site. In, fact, this approach is typically much easier than browsing a long list of tickets and wading through their entitlements. When you visit an event page on the site or a selection page, that page will explain that a ticket is required for viewing and provide a button to view all tickets that grant access to that event or selection.

Events

When a festival is configured to require a ticket for an event, you may see something like this:

This virtual screening requires a ticket in order to be seen

The exact message may differ depending on whether you are logged in, whether you already have tickets, and whether tickets are currently on sale or will be on sale in the future. Nevertheless, by clicking on the “Tickets” button, you can see a list of tickets that can be applied to this event.

There are two ticket options for this virtual screening block

All tickets in this list will grant you access to this event. In this example, the second ticket grants you access only to this screening while the first ticket grants you access to everything in the festival. The festival very likely has other tickets available through the “Tickets” page, but those tickets do not grant access to this virtual screening. 

To purchase one of these tickets, click the “Select” button for that ticket. You will then be directed to the “Tickets” page with the quantity for your ticket of choice pre-filled to “1”. You may change the quantity, add other tickets to your shopping cart, add a donation, or apply a discount as is appropriate.

Selections

The rules around selections are slightly different. Festivals may configure selections to be accessible only through screenings, or they may be accessible “on-demand” directly from the selection page. You can see whatever options are available to you from the page for the selection in question by clicking the “Viewing Options” button.

The “Viewing Options” button opens a window with your viewing options

The window that opens up shows the screenings divided into “Online” and “In-Person” in which this selection is programmed as well as whether you currently have on-demand access.

This selection is programmed in a single virtual screening block

Because we don't yet have any tickets, we see a message saying we currently have no on-demand viewing access. If the selection didn't require a ticket for on-demand or if we already had a ticket with on-demand access, we'd see a button to watch this selection directly from this window.

To buy a ticket granting access to this selection, select one of the screenings and complete the process described earlier for “Events”.