Photo: Visit Victoria
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival is a global comedy giant, but even the biggest names face operational hurdles.
Their popular “Happy Hour” promotion, a fantastic perk for audiences, historically demanded a mountain of manual work from their box office team, especially when things were crazy during the festival rush.
Imagine the hours spent juggling spreadsheets, checking limits, and updating forms – time that could be better spent delivering incredible customer service.
We partnered with the festival to tackle this challenge, with a solution that dramatically reduced their workload by empowering artists and promoters directly.
This example reveals how Red61’s collaborative approach transformed a time-consuming administrative burden into a seamless process, freeing up the festival’s team to focus on what they do best: creating memorable experiences.
If you’ve ever wished you could reclaim hours from manual ticketing tasks and unlock new levels of efficiency, then you’re in the right place.
Read on to learn more about how Red61’s automated promotions can streamline your box office operations!
Rosie Jones performing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2025 season launch. Photo: Nick Robertson
The scenario
The Melbourne International Comedy Festival is a renowned open-access comedy festival, held every Autumn in the city of Melbourne, Australia. As one of the largest arts festivals in the world, it has a reputation for providing a platform to some of Australia’s best new comedians, alongside established names from around the world.
The festival offers customers a regular “Happy Hour” promotion, allowing selected performances to be purchased at a 2-for-1 rate during a restricted time period. This previously required a significant amount of manual setup, with performances added to offers individually within the box office.
In past years, the in-house box office team managed updates to the offer each week it was available, with overheads and lost time incurred due to additional processes. These issues are compounded during the festival, where customer experience takes precedence.
Finding a solution
As a result of these challenges, Red61 worked with Melbourne International Comedy Festival to provide a solution that gave producers more control. This allowed ticketing staff to save significant time on adding performances, checking ticket caps were applied correctly, and updating form entries manually, as the system took care of all these processes.
“Producers and artists could update their ticket caps at any time, with the system preventing them from reducing the offer below what was already sold,” says Melbourne International Comedy Festival ticketing manager, Rachel Hanley.
“Some producers even adjusted their caps, or removed a performance entirely, during the promo window if they hit their sales targets early.”
Audiences enjoying a performance at the festival. Photo: Time Out/Jesse Hisco
Streamlining the process
This solution required collaboration between both Red61 and the festival’s ticketing team to confirm the initial setup. Much of this is configured within the Red61 ticketing platform, however some minor back-end updates were applied by the Red61 team, based on the requirements of the offer.
“The initial setup of our “Happy Hour” offers was as easy as any other kind of ticket offer,” says Hanley. “The only change was that Red61 handled the back-end implementation.”
“Compared to other festival-wide promos, which we set up through the Ticket Offers section of the client, the workload was significantly reduced.”
With effective communication through Red61’s usual support channels, both parties worked together to validate this in a testing environment, before configuring the offer on the festival’s live Ticket Management Dashboard.
Given Red61’s past experience in setting up similar offers and detailed documentation of these processes, the time taken to implement this promotion was greatly minimised.
Happy box office, happy customers
By handing over more control to artists and promoters, and providing them with the flexibility to add tickets to this promotion when they chose, the box office team saw a number of benefits throughout the duration of the festival.
Here’s what Melbourne International Comedy Festival’s ticketing manager, Rachel Hanley, had to say about the implementation:
“The flexibility made the whole process very accessible and removed any harsh deadlines.”
“We’re used to spending hours adding performances and checking ticket caps against spreadsheets and form entries, but with this method we gained all that time back.”
“The only real check needed was making sure artists selected future dates from the time each offer started (you can’t discount a past performance!).”
“Otherwise, it was very easy for us to monitor, and having a report we could run in an instant meant our box office team could confidently recommend eligible shows during our “Happy Hour” windows.”
Melbourne International Comedy Festival performance at the Palais Theatre. Photo: Nick Robertson
How Red61 can help
The Red61 team is always looking for opportunities to collaborate with our clients, and this partnership with the Melbourne International Comedy Festival team is no exception.
As a result of this setup and feedback provided following the festival, our Product and Development teams have since considered innovative new features and areas of improvement that will provide even more autonomy for staff, artists and promoters during a festival run or season.
This collaboration underlines our focus on empowering Red61 users to save time on ticketing processes, and deliver unforgettable experiences for their customers.
Read up on our Ticketing Solutions below, and get in touch to request a demo or learn more about how Red61 can streamline your box office.