Polymanga uses the Infomaniak ticketing solution to manage 50,000 visitors

Polymanga is one of the biggest conventions in Europe focussing on manga, video games and pop culture. The festival relies on Infomaniak’s ticketing and cloud hosting solutions to manage ticket sales, access for festival-goers and visitors to the polymanga.com website. Polymanga has welcomed more than 200 exhibitors, artists, tiktokers, cosplayers and YouTubers and entertained tens of thousands of visitors of all ages for 17 years in Switzerland.

The needs of Polymanga

A convention such as Polymanga depends primarily on the ticketing service. The website and ticketing service have to keep up with the one-off boom in traffic with more than 20,000 visits/day. On site, we need an easy and reliable tool to control access 24 hours a day during the 4 days of the festival. All at affordable rates.

David Heim, Founder and organiser of Polymanga

Technical challenges

Handle the load of thousands of online ticket purchases on the same day.
Sell tickets online without registering on the website.
Manage access for 50,000+ visitors.
Sell tickets on site at 10 points of sale throughout Switzerland.

Choosing Infomaniak Ticketing to sell tickets

We have tested other ticketing solutions, but Infomaniak’s technology best meets our changing needs while offering an affordable price. The solution changes regularly: we discuss in advance which features would be useful to us and then some of them are developed.

The interfaces of the Infomaniak ticketing solution are simple while allowing for precise configuration. If necessary, we can call on Infomaniak’s specialists at the outset to get started, for example. But once installed, everything runs smoothly and the basic Infomaniak functions are more than sufficient for 95% of existing websites.

For a major event like Polymanga, trust is paramount. And it has to be said that Infomaniak is one of the only players in the ticketing sector to remain consistent in its vision, respecting customers and their shared values. I have never had any unpleasant surprises in terms of pricing or related to new conditions. It is a very Swiss approach – reassuring while seeking to innovate. It’s rare, and it allows for long-term planning.

David Heim, Founder and organiser of Polymanga

Implementation of the Polymanga ticketing service

Phase 1 – preparation of the ticketing service

The ticketing service configuration allows you to define the criteria specific to Polymanga:

Its quotas: definition of the maximum number of tickets available for sale for each day of the festival.
Its channels: definition of the distribution channels (online, sales network, on-site, sponsors, etc.).
Its prices: pre-sales prices, on-site sales prices, etc.

The Polymanga organisation creates the ticket design and uploads it to the Infomaniak ticketing solution then redirects to the general terms and conditions. This is followed by the pre-publication tests. The team will print the tickets themselves.

Before launching the ticketing service, it is necessary to program the ticketing service to manage all the sales phases automatically (opening dates, prices and early bird limits, etc.).

We’ve noticed that some of our customers are impulse buyers: they want to be able to purchase their tickets quickly without registering. The Infomaniak ticketing team developed this option at our request and it’s now available to all customers!

As print on demand requires more training of store staff, we pre-printed all the tickets for the 10 points of sale across Switzerland. Each POS is provided with a scanner by Infomaniak, and all they have to do is scan a ticket to activate it in advance. There is no need for print on demand, which considerably reduces the number of visitors waiting at the entrance to the festival.

Phase 2 – tickets go on sale online and on-site

Polymanga takes place every year at Easter and pre-sales are open at the end of November with the activation of the Infomaniak ticketing service.

There is already a lot of pressure at the time of pre-sales. The record attendance in recent years means that we sometimes have to limit on-site access temporarily to pre-sales only.

David Heim, Founder and organiser of Polymanga

Polymanga uses 20 scanners rented by Infomaniak for the staff and the 10 points of sale.

When the ticketing service opens for each edition, the polymanga.com website experiences peaks of more than 20,000 visitors per day. This is nothing like the rest of the year. To host the website, the specifications are twofold:

cost as little as possible per year
be able to handle a significant one-off visit overload

To meet these needs without having to provision resources unnecessarily all year round, Infomaniak offered its platform as a service (PaaS) Jelastic Cloud. It allows us to provision and resize the resources of the server hosting polymanga.com. The increase in capacity takes place on its own. Everything is automatic and visitors never notice the huge number of simultaneous requests, as there is no slowdown. In the end, Polymanga only pays for the resources actually used.

Phase 3: ticket sales and control during the event

On the day itself, everything is managed via a single tool. The ticketing service makes it possible to sell tickets on site and manage access control at the gates using the scanners and thermal printers provided by Infomaniak. It also allows festival sponsors to collect their tickets for their partners.

Polymanga organisers were looking for technology that was easy to deploy and easy to use by staff. For the training of the team at the entrances to the event, a small two-page manual is sufficient to explain how to use the scans and synchronise with the system.

The learning curve is almost non-existent. Thanks to a small manual, even computer beginners can use the service successfully.

David Heim, Founder and organiser of Polymanga

The result is an optimal ticketing experience for everyone involved

The result was a seamless ticketing experience for visitors, from visiting the website and purchasing tickets online or in stores to the event itself and even during the event, with the possibility of purchasing drinks via the ticketing service without having to wait.

Polymanga benefits at every stage of the event. Planning in advance ensures peace of mind as soon as the ticket sales are launched. Visitor flows are planned in advance, leaving time for unforeseen incidents during the event.

We stick with Infomaniak for their work ethic, benevolence and the innovative and pioneering aspect. These are values that we share and that are often mentioned in reference to us. We believe that ethics are just as important as reliability.

David Heim, Founder and organiser of Polymanga