Changes in party sizes

A simple enough question, but one which piqued our interest. We’ve seen a drop in overall ticket sales over the last five years (based on analysis of a consistent cohort of 255 venues from Audience Answers, and as noted in the articles here and here). But exploring that change by party size (that is: the number of tickets purchased in the same transaction) threw up some notable findings. 

The first thing we can note is that the number of single tickets sold has dropped (2023/24 sales were 90.0% of 2018/19), but by slightly less than overall ticket sales: 

Strikingly, this also shows that there are almost the same number of three-ticket transactions as before, but much bigger drops for larger groups (e.g. transactions with >12 tickets are 71.9% of 2018/19 in 2023/24).

Indeed, if we look at the change in the absolute number of tickets purchased by each transaction size, it’s clear that most of the reduction is coming from two categories: those purchasing pairs of tickets and those purchasing more than twelve in one go:

The former is by far the most typical transaction size (37% of all tickets), so a drop in this group in line with the overall decrease (-11%, cf. -12% overall) results in a large drop in ticket sales (over 900k fewer sold, or 32% of the overall reduction). The latter is a much small share of overall sales (16%, despite each transaction of course containing more tickets) but faced a much larger proportionate decrease (-28%). As a result, larger transactions saw an even larger decrease in total ticket sales (nearly 1M fewer, 35% of the overall reduction).

As a result of these changes, both single ticket and two ticket transactions, despite reducing in absolute numbers, were actually a higher proportion of sales in 2023/24 compared to 2018/19 (9.1% cf. 8.9% for single tickets; 37.4% cf. 36.7% for pairs); while the proportion of sales of 7+ tickets at a time dropped:

This highlights that there are two trends which are combining to impact of ticket sales: an overall drop (which is most apparent among the most popular transaction size, pairs of tickets) and a reduction in larger transaction sizes in particular (most notable among the 12+ ticket transactions).

The larger drop in tickets sold from larger transaction sizes shows the importance of addressing this trend alongside the general decrease in sales.

We’re keen to hear from cultural venues about how larger bookings are going, whether they are groups of friends, school trips, ticket agents, subscriptions, or from other sources. The Sutton Trust have noted that 50% of schools have reduced their spend on school trips, for example: https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/school-funding-and-pupil-premium-2024/.

Are your audiences holding up well? (and if so, what’s working for you that others could learn from?). Or are you seeing this overall picture play out at your venue? (and if so, do you have ideas for how to reverse the trend?). Share your thoughts via email to olivermantell@theaudienceagency.org or via our LinkedIn.

Subscribe to our Ticketing Insights Essentials plan to have a handy report emailed to you each month with your party size compared to last year and a benchmark, as well as other key metrics.