For the 50th
year of the festival, the IFFI committee, especially the Entertainment Society of Goa, has decided to
revamp its ticketing process. For the first time, IFFI has gone paperless! This
first and foremost means that there are no hardcopy tickets for any show. With
9,300 delegates and over 30 shows every day for 10 days, that is a lot of paper
saved!
But, how does one
enter a movie hall then? Well, it can now be done via the magnetic card that
doubles as your delegate card.
The process of standing
in queues to book tickets has also been reduced, with ticket booking, which can
be conveniently done online, from the comfort of your home.
In theory, it sounds
like the perfect plan – book your tickets at home and show up for the movie. No
need to stand for hours in booking queues or wait in the tatkal ticketless
line.
But even the best
laid plans have loopholes.
Problem 1: When
people book online and not show up
One of the most
important things that IFFI overlooked was that people tend to book tickets
online, but not show up for the films. And that essentially means a lot of
empty seats in the hall, with no one to fill them, because the
tatkal/ticketless line has been done away with.
Midnight ‘jam’ and
then House-full
The other thing that
IFFI management didn’t foresee is that people would all end up trying to access
the online booking at midnight, when the lines open, essentially leading to the
systems hanging and crashing, thereby leaving no way of booking the tickets, despite
logging in the wee hours. And by the time you wake up in the morning, all halls
are ‘house full’.
No one bothers to
cancel
Now, IFFI ESG
management does mention that you can avail of any cancelled tickets about one
hour before the film, but let’s be honest, where is the motivation to cancel
your tickets? All movie bookings are free of cost and there is no official
penalty for not showing up for a film you have booked tickets for, so why take
the trouble of cancelling your tickets?
If seats are empty,
last minute entry should be allowed
In earlier years, the
people at the counter would have an automatic counter, which displayed how many
seats were available, about 10 minutes before the showing of the film. This
allowed people who had not booked the tickets to enter the hall. We can only
hope that next year, that seats which are empty are opened to the ticketless
public 10 minutes prior to the show. People with tickets should still be
allowed to enter the hall, up until the film shows, but, whatever seats are
empty should not go to waste, which is what has been seen happening since the
first day of IFFI 50.
Shocker: Codes are
not being used for online booking
The other issue many
are facing is the complicated process of online booking. Earlier, we could just
use the code next to the film screening (A15, B75, C60, etc), which was
specific for day, date, hall and film, so there were no two alike. This year,
even though the codes are given in the screening booklet, this nifty bit of
genius code is not being utilised in the online booking. We have to manually
feed in the day, date, hall and film choice. Why devolve? We already had come
up with a plan to circumvent this laborious process in previous years.
Paperless still
works
Despite these
glitches and bumps, we must commend the management for going paperless. This
has also resulted in putting an end to the swapping of passes. In previous
years, when delegates didn’t want to attend the screening of a particular film
or the members of the media that are allowed 5 film viewings didn’t want to
avail of this, they used to swap their hardcopy tickets outside the film hall.
This as well as booking using another person’s card has stopped drastically.
High time there’s an
IFFI app with seat availability notifications
Going digital and
going online is definitely the way forward. Do we need an IFFI app next, maybe
something more intuitive? A system that helps suggest films based on your
preference of genre? Can we have a method of knowing how many seats are empty and
available as a message or a notification? Can we have a digital counter outside
each hall, which shows in real time how many people have entered the hall (like
how they have at parking lots in malls)?
All
in all, one does know that the intentions were good, and some of the new ideas
have struck gold, but many of the processes need tweaking and good intentions
also need to see better execution, at IFFI.
