Could self-service ticketing give your team more time to focus on audiences? Andrew Flack, Client Development Manager at mtc Media Ltd, explores how kiosks can extend ticket sales, offer visitors more choice, and give staff more time to welcome visitors and answer their questions.
Self-service is ubiquitous throughout retail, but perhaps the last place we expect to see self-service ticketing is at our local, friendly arts venue. Walk into most supermarkets, airports, or fast food chains, and self-service is simply the default. It’s not framed as innovation anymore; it’s just how transactions happen. Independent theatres, cinemas, and visitor attractions have been slower to follow, and for understandable reasons: these are venues built on personal connection, on the relationship between box office staff and returning audience members, on a sense of welcome that feels distinctly different from a supermarket checkout.
That’s precisely why the shift is worth paying attention to now. Consumer expectation has moved toward self-service as a default option across almost every other part of daily life, and audiences are arriving at arts venues already fluent in the behaviour, even if they’ve never used a kiosk at a theatre before. For independent venues, this may not feel like a pressing requirement today. But early adopters are discovering that the operational benefits are real, and not just financial.
The pressures facing independent venues
I’ve spoken to many venues over the past few years about kiosks. They are each exploring the idea for a range of reasons, but commonly at the heart of the conversation is the inevitable cost-saving potential.
That instinct is well founded. UK Theatre’s 2025 sector report found more than a third of organisations now forecast an operating deficit, rising to over half among subsidised theatres. Staffing sits at the centre of that pressure, with 94% of UK producers expecting staffing costs to keep rising as a share of income. Even the National Theatre, hardly a small independent, has seen staff costs climb by roughly £13 million in two years, now accounting for 39% of total expenditure, or 70% once freelancer and royalty costs are included. For venues without that scale or public backing, the same structural pressure lands harder, and with fewer levers to pull, leaving remaining staff to pick up additional roles on top of their own.
Set against that backdrop, the appeal of self-serve isn’t about chasing a retail trend for its own sake. It’s a practical response to a staffing model that’s under strain, without needing to cut the human element that makes your venues what they are.
What adoption of self-service ticketing looks like in practice
Introducing a self-service ticket kiosk at a venue means it’s open to sell tickets as soon as the doors open, rather than being limited to whenever a staffed box office can be resourced. A staffed box office can then focus on the hours where its presence adds the most value – pre-show, at key sale points, or when a personal touch or complex query genuinely needs a person – rather than covering every hour a venue is open.
This is the point worth underlining: For venues adopting a hybrid or a fully digital model, the efficiency case isn’t about kiosks simply replacing staff. Instead, it allows venues to reallocate staff to the things that actually improve the visitor experience: Front-of-house presence, resolving exceptions, and helping first-time visitors navigate a building – the kind of work a kiosk can’t do and shouldn’t try to.
In practice, a hybrid model gives customers real choice: Browsing and booking events, self-selecting or automatically allocating seats, applying membership discounts or promo codes, adding a charitable donation at the point of purchase, and collecting pre-booked tickets or printing new ones on the spot, all without needing a staff member involved. Multiple kiosks can serve more than one customer at once, which matters most in the exact moments a single staffed desk struggles – just before curtain up or when a popular event goes on sale. Staff are then free to focus on the customers and moments that genuinely need a person: A first-time visitor who needs orientation, an accessibility request, or simply the warmth of being welcomed by name.
Seeing it work: Storyhouse
Storyhouse in Chester, once the city’s Odeon and now a cultural venue combining live performance, cinema, a library, and places to eat, offers one of the clearest examples of what this shift can look like in practice. Storyhouse installed four ticket kiosks and went further than most venues would consider, removing its physical box office entirely.
The result is a venue that sells tickets for the entire time its doors are open, not just the hours a staffed desk can cover. As Fiona Yates-Dutton, then Box Office Manager at Storyhouse, put it following delivery:
"Our four on-site kiosks allow us to sell tickets the entire time we're open beyond our regular customer service hours. We see them used by a wide variety of demographics from our audience, especially for quick buy on the day purchases."
The kiosks sit alongside, rather than replace, the full range of ways customers can get a ticket: Booking online for an e-ticket, or choosing to collect paper tickets at a kiosk, useful for distributing tickets to the rest of a group. It’s a good illustration of the hybrid principle in action: More ways for customers to get what they want, without stretching a small team thinner to deliver it.
Where this leaves independent venues
None of this suggests every independent cinema, theatre, or attraction needs a full kiosk estate tomorrow, or needs to remove its box office entirely, as Storyhouse chose to. The venues getting the most out of this shift are the ones treating it as one part of a wider conversation about how staff time gets spent, where cost pressure is sharpest, and what audiences are already used to elsewhere. Self-serve doesn’t replace the welcome a venue offers; it changes where and when that welcome is delivered.
For venues weighing up whether this is worth exploring, the starting point isn’t, „Should we automate the box office?“ It’s a narrower question: „Where in our current operation is staff time being spent on transactions that a kiosk could handle, freeing people up for the parts of the visitor experience that actually need them?„
If that question sounds familiar, it’s worth a conversation. We’ve spent the past several years helping venues like yours find their own answer to it, and every venue’s answer looks a little different.
