What are you doing tonight?

Posted by Bogdan Lazar

Tickets on the Fly iPhone App Review.

It’s Friday, there are just 2 hours until you finish your work day and you realize that you want to do something special today. You try to find out what’s happening tonight in the city and how much it would cost you to attend, but after half an hour of browsing through a ton of sites, you give up. It’s clear, you’re staying home tonight. But what if there was an application that would help you find the best events in your city and giving you the possibility of buying them at the cheapest price without accessing any other site? Well, there's an app for that: Tickets on the Fly.

How it works

After you download the app, all there’s left for you to do is slide through the events shown on the screen and access the one that you are interested in. You can choose to see events that are happening this week, this month or this year. Or, better yet, you can find events by pressing on the search button at the top of the screen. If you have a particular event in mind, just write its name and, if tickets are available, it will pop out on the screen. You can also choose to search for events according to state, city or event name.

Once you’ve found your favorite event, you have a couple of arranging options for all the tickets available. You can choose to arrange by section, row, quantity or price. Also, before deciding which seat to take, you can visualize the seating chart to get a better idea of how far away from the stage you’re going to be. Choose your ticket and order it via phone or email.

But how is this new?

Tickets on the Fly wants to be a direct link between buyer and seller, where the buyer is you and the seller is someone like you. They pitch themselves as not a broker. They don’t add their own fees when it comes to purchasing and selling tickets, so, in theory, you get cheaper tickets by roughly 35%, they estimate.

Great, does it work that way?

Not exactly. At first, I couldn’t figure out how I could post my own tickets on their app. I assumed an account was required, but couldn’t find any sign-up button on the app. Their website did provide me with an answer, but an answer that bummed me out. Tickets on the Fly may not be a broker themselves, but they get the tickets listed on the website from brokers. Just because they don’t add their own 35% surcharge doesn’t mean the other brokers won’t.

They are charging brokers $75 per month to get them to list the tickets you’re going to buy, so that pretty much makes it compulsory that the person listing a ticket charge more for the ticket in order to make up for the fee they’re paying to get the ticket listed.

So what Tickets on the Fly ends up being is a aggregator of tickets from various brokers, and not a place where persons like you and me can sell extra or unwanted tickets to events. With that in mind, there’s nothing wrong with doing it like this. But my expectations were wrong from reading their App Store description.

Other than that, the application also suffers from a usability flaw. Events are not categorized into types, so you couldn’t possibly search for concerts or football games. Instead, events are thrown into the the mix without categorization, apart from date and location. It’d be great to be able to filter out sport events if all I’m interested in are concerts.

With some additions, a full disclosure in the App Store description, Tickets on the Fly could really get you to that Linkin Park concert that’s happening near you - on the fly!

Screenshots