1st June, 2022
Founded 125 years ago, The National Trust are custodians to more than 500 historic houses, castles, parks, and gardens across the UK, ranging from grand mansions and castles to lighthouses and churches, as well as nearly one million works of art.
Employing 10,000 people and supported by more than 50,000 volunteers and 5 million members, in excess of 20 million people enjoy visiting National Trust properties annually.
With the majority of visits being booked online and Covid-19 posing challenges to traditional visitor management techniques, the National Trust needed a proven, resilient and innovative solution to efficiently manage visitor numbers, whilst providing a world-class customer experience both during and after the global pandemic.
Following a competitive tender process and a successful 3-month pilot project, a 3-year contract has been awarded to DigiTickets, a leading UK-based Ticketing & EPOS software provider.
With the full rollout having taken place during summer 2021, the project has been hailed a great success with positive feedback from the National Trust properties who are reaping the benefits of real-time visitor capacity management, quick and easy ticket redemptions, and an array of new ticketing tools and features deployed by DigiTickets.
Parisa Milani-Coombs, IT Commercial Lead at National Trust, commented:
“Deploying an upgraded ticketing solution has been a critical project for us during these unprecedented times. The solution needed to balance the needs of our visitors, our property operations teams, and the National Trust management team. A key requirement was a partner that could manage our booking volumes; we needed a solution that could cater for 60,000 concurrent users, process 15 million bookings per year, and manage 130,000 bookable time slots per week in real-time. We’re delighted to say that the project has been a success and we’re looking forward to a continued relationship with DigiTickets.”
Rich Booker, Managing Director of DigiTickets, said:
“We’re all very excited to be working with the National Trust, and seeing both their team and visitors benefiting from our software. The feedback from visitors as well as the operations and management teams within the National Trust has been extremely positive.
Following the successful conclusion of the pilot project this summer, we’re now really looking forward to building on this success and working with the National Trust over the next 3 years and beyond.”