No, not thrill rides at Disneyland, but the electronic version. A couple of techies at our museum want to impliment the process of "print your own at home" tickets and use scanners at the gate like airlines currently do. Since we are not an airline or an airline museum, I am skeptical about a seemless, trouble-free transition to this methodology. Does anyone out there have a war story or two that we can learn from?

PS: I noted with interest that Florida Railroad Museum is canning their e-ticket program. ANy inside info on that?

We have been using Ticket Biscuit since March. I'm not directly involved, but it seems to be working OK. They customized the system to fit our business. It does generate a reservation voucher on line with a bar code. However, we have not been using a bar code reader when boarding. We exchange the voucher for train tickets at the depot.

It does generate reports that tell you how many tickets are sold for a specific train, etc. I know it is still a work in progress, but the Ticket Biscuit people have been great and very easy to work with. I have no idea of the cost, but I know for our Polar Express trains here is a $2.00 "convienence fee" per ticket that they keep. I don't think this applied to the regular excusions this summer, so I don't know how that worked costwise.

Check our website.

Bill Houston
Heart of Dixie RR Museum
Calera, AL

http://www.hodrrm.org/

> I know for our Polar Express trains here is a $2.00
> "convienence fee" per ticket that they keep.

Have you had much customer resistance to that fee? Personally, I hate convenience fees (starting with the name), and do anything I can to avoid paying them, though sometimes I have no choice.

From a consumer point of view, that simply means that the ticket costs $2 more each, no matter what you care to call the fee, and then to top it off, the extra $2 doesn't even go to the museum operation. (I'd much rather give $2 more and have it go to the museum rather than somebody like Ticketmaster and support their monopolistic practices)

On the other hand, our operation is facing the same kind of decision, and these fees are pretty common among most options. I have suggested that we simply increase the stated fare by $2 (or whatever) and drop the "convenience fee" language. When it's the only option, there's nothing "convenient" about it, and it's just another business expense, like fuel, crews, rolling stock. Just add them up, and tell me the actual ticket cost, without any extra fees.

I guess we could go the other route, and have "booking fees" "terminal fees" "track usage fee" and a "fuel surcharge" so that your "$10 ticket" ends up costing $37.50 like the cell phone company does.

We just started using Ticket Turtle with this year's Santa Trains.

Allows e-tickets. We will probably just use the honor system instead of bar code reading.

The cost is I believe $0.65 per ticket, but I will check into it.

In the end it saves us many volunteer manhours of stuffing envelopes, printing, and mailing tickets.

So far with nearly 1/3 of our 3,420 tickets sold we have had to mail out 12 packages total.

I will let everyone know how the organization likes the service after the trips.

http://www.vratrips.org/

http://www.ticketturtle.com/website/about.html

Chris