Exclusive | Why Hong Kong venues lag mainland China in online ticket sales and e-payments
Top officials say residents’ preference for buying tickets in person at a box office, and a longer history of credit card sales, partly responsible for the city’s rather more traditional approach
Digital innovation at Hong Kong’s largest ticketing service is lagging the mainland and will continue to for at least five more years, top government officials in charge of the service have said.
But it still does well on data protection and the human elements of a transaction, which local audiences still value, they said.
Local ticketing services were made to look a little backwards when the director of the Beijing Palace Museum Shan Jixiang told a Hong Kong audience recently that all 32 ticket counters at the museum were closed as of 1 October this year in favour of electronic tickets for all 80,000 daily visitors.
But one top ticketing official said changes north of the border served as motivation for local distributors to keep up.
“We have taken note of their strides and are enhancing Urbtix, our ticketing system since 1984, while examining payment methods for the future,” Vivian Yeung Wing-kam, chief manager of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department (LCSD) in charge of ticketing, said.
“We saw a major revamp in 2014 at Cityline, our service partner since 2007, such as increasing the online capacity tenfold and introducing a new mobile app, but the consumption pattern remains steady.”
