Kino uses Queue-it for movie ticket onsales: “It’s a business necessity”

Kino does more than just sell tickets. It also serves as a consolidated hub for film fans to engage with cinema-related content, write their own reviews, and participate in an online community of film enthusiasts.

Kino leverages this enthusiasm when hosting presales, on behalf of the theaters, to the year’s biggest blockbusters. It receives over 700,000 unique visitors per month, and more than 750,000 customers have downloaded its mobile app. In 2017, Kino sold 2.2 million tickets.

Challenge

Kino and its integrated systems can handle 500-1,000 users at the same time without issue. But during highly-anticipated presales, Kino experiences a more than tenfold increase. It was operation-critical for Kino to stay online if it was to maintain the trust and business of its partner movie theaters. At first, Kino tried to scale up its servers. The upscaling could double the website’s traffic capacity, but the peaks were still exponentially higher than it could handle. Moreover, server scaling would be irrelevant if Kino’s integrated payment and ticketing systems didn’t also scale up their infrastructure. End-users would just experience a downtime later during checkout.

"Before we had Queue-it, the site would crash every time during presales, resulting in a huge loss of revenue. We scaled up the servers quite a lot, which was extremely expensive, and it didn’t help. Plus, it didn’t ensure that our integrated ticketing and payment systems wouldn’t crash."

Charli Bregnballe, CTO, Kino

Solution

Through referrals from other customers, Kino implemented Queue-it’s virtual waiting room solution and has since successfully conducted over two dozen presales. With Queue-it’s intuitive setup it took Kino only 5-10 minutes to set up the virtual waiting room in advance of its presales.

"Queue-it is just easy to set up, and has become a natural part of our presales. During the 20-25 presales I’ve run, the fact is I haven’t had a single problem."

Charli Bregnballe, CTO, Kino

Results

With Queue-it’s virtual waiting room, Kino was able to retain presale revenue, maintain business partnerships, and avoid excessive server costs. Kino’s movie presales benefited especially from Queue-it’s configurable queue page. The company has embedded trailers and other teaser content for end-users to get excited about the event while they stand by to purchase their tickets. This resulted in an improved customer experience overall. Queue-it is now a critical part of Kino’s business and IT infrastructure.

"If we don’t use a virtual waiting room we cannot run presales for blockbusters like Star Wars and Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s a business necessity."

Charli Bregnballe, CTO, Kino

About Kino

Kino.dk is the biggest film website in Denmark with around 8 million annual visitors. It serves as a ticketing provider for movie theaters and an entertainment content hub and community for film fans.