Edinburgh festivals hope to launch joint box office for all 11 August events

Geoff Sobelle’s The Clown Show is on the programme for this year’s Edinburgh international festival. Photograph: Maria Baranova View image in fullscreen Geoff Sobelle’s The Clown Show is on the programme for this year’s Edinburgh international festival. Photograph: Maria Baranova Edinburgh festivals hope to launch joint box office for all 11 August events Bosses believe having single booking process will drive up ticket sales for all festivals to offset funding squeeze The Edinburgh festivals hope to launch a single box office for all the city’s 11 festivals to make it simpler to buy tickets and profit from the “lake” of customer data they hold. Festival directors hope a universal box office will allow them to increase ticket sales and attract a wealthy corporate sponsor, such as Mastercard, to offset deep cuts in public funding they expect to see in coming years. The idea has been under discussion in private for some time, sources have said, but it jumped in prominence when the Succession star Brian Cox said one was desperately needed during an arts sector panel discussion last year. The festivals involved in the plan, including the main international festival , will soon invite bidders to investigate how to merge the ticketing operations and data of all 11 events, which in 2024 sold nearly 4m tickets in total. Others include the book festival and the film festival. They believe it could lead to a year-round ticketing app. But the Edinburgh festival fringe, the city’s largest, has leapt ahead by announcing plans for its own rival app. Tony Lankester, the Fringe’s chief executive, told the Guardian the society would be piloting an early beta version of it with 1,000 festival-goers this August, after he designed a prototype at home using the AI code-writing system Claude. View image in fullscreen Tony Lankester, the Fringe Society’s chief executive, has begun developing an app for fringe events. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian The festivals, already wrestling with rising inflation and staffing costs, as well as a new 5% visitors’ levy on hotel beds in Edinburgh, are also braced for significant subsidy cuts from the Scottish government. Scottish ministers last year pledged £200m over three years for Scotland’s arts sector after an earlier funding crisis, and in March gave the fringe £1m over two years to develop new digital capabilities. But ministers now have to save in the region of £5bn in their overall spending by 2030, and cuts are likely to fall hardest on unprotected areas such as culture. The soaring costs of staying in Edinburgh is also putting people off, reducing ticket sales and cutting the number of producers visiting to find new shows, Lankester said, as he unveiled the programme for this year’s fringe, which runs from 7 to 31 August. The Post Office found that in June, Edinburgh has the highest hotel costs out of 50 European cities, beating London, Venice, Paris and Barcelona. Its “city costs barometer” said it was the third m