Gantner Ticketing, a provider of software for museums, zoos, cultural heritage and visitor attractions, is reflecting on one of its major projects in recent years, a top attraction in London, UK.
With 150,000 tickets sold per year, The Postal Museum is popular with both mail aficionados and tourists in the capital, preserving an important part of British industrial and social history.
Wanting to ensure its thousands of visitors have a smooth customer journey, The Postal Museum opted to use Gantner’s Recreatex solution as its platform for ticketing, retail sales, and visitor insights.
IT manager for the venue, Ian Tolley says: “Although ticketing software systems were something new to us at the time, we did have a vision of what our system needed to offer.
“Ideally, we wanted to have all activities under one uniform roof, including management of ticket sales, retail sales for the two museum locations, café, events and more. We knew it would simplify and accelerate the gathering of operational and management information if we did not have to extract it from many different systems.”
Going underground
Delving into the history of the UK’s postal service, artefacts found at The Postal Museum include a 19th-century mail coach, firearms carried by Victorian-era postmen and postwomen, and vintage Post Office literature and stamp designs.
One of the attraction’s highlights is the Mail Rail, taking visitors on a journey along part of the six-mile underground track that used to deliver post from East London’s Whitechapel to Paddington in the west. The original Mail Rail was mothballed in 2003 after 75 years in its primary use.
Wanting to connect its diverse offering, The Postal Museum began a comprehensive market search and tender process in 2016, before committing to Gantner’s Recreatex software as its preferred ticketing platform. “Recreatex offers a remarkably broad scope of functionalities, which for us knocked out most of the competition,” says Tolley.
“It is a powerful, mature system that offers pretty much everything we need. Apart from the ticketing, group, trade and school bookings, we also use Recreatex for our retail sales at the two museum gift shops, and there are many other functionalities which combined to make Recreatex the most comprehensive solution for our needs.”
Agile and flexible
When the pandemic arrived, the museum was able to react by offering tickets through its Recreatex webshop, a safe alternative to physical, on-site sales. This made the GANTNER platform the new ‘shop window’ and a vital point of contact. This dependence on technology meant that the webshop had to help visitors navigate easily through what could be a complex pricing and booking scheme.
The Postal Museum doesn’t operate a straightforward one-admission fee that covers all the venue policy. Visitors have to book a time slot for the popular Mail Rail attraction, as well as an optional time slot for the Sorted! Play Area, where under-11s can try on costumes and deliver mail on time.
The system also needs to accommodate Gift Aid donations and those who have year-round membership access to museum galleries. Access control is also monitored across the Postal Museum site with hand-held ticket scanners. With a complex structure, Gantner needed to meet a range of requirements, which according to Tolley, Recreatex delivers.
Tolley says: “Updating and security patching the cloud-based software could not be more painless. When an update is planned, we just sit back and relax, everything goes flawlessly. Even when an issue does pop up unexpectedly, the vast majority of the problems are solved within a few minutes through Gantner’s reactive helpdesk.”
Gantner Ticketing has recently upgraded the sales process at Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, a unique archive for one of the Netherlands’ most notable collections.
