Giving Rental Companies Real-Time Visibility with a Centralized Ticketing Service

The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts – known locally as The Isabel – is a major hub for arts and culture on the shores of Lake Ontario in Kingston, Ontario. Operated by Queen’s University, the 90,000-square-foot venue includes a 567-seat performance hall, a flexible black box studio, a recital hall, film and media studios, a screening room, galleries, and a sound stage, serving both the university community and Kingston’s wider arts scene.

For years, rental companies arrived at The Isabel with their own ticketing platforms. While workable for presenters, this approach created real challenges for patrons, with different seating maps, inconsistent ticket delivery, and mismatched customer communications making it difficult to navigate events in the same physical space.

The venue’s largest revenue stream came from rental activity, yet the patron experience varied widely depending on which ticketing system each promoter used. Without a single view of rental audiences, it was also harder for The Isabel to support rental organizations and understand how patrons moved between events.

When The Isabel began updating its own seating maps in Spektrix, the team saw an opportunity to bring more rental ticketing in-house. They knew that classical music patrons particularly valued assigned seating and the ability to choose their preferred seats for each event.

With a high proportion of classical music events in their rental calendar, they saw an opportunity to drive a real shift among promoters and to build a more consistent, patron-focused booking experience.

At the 2025 Spektrix Hubs event in Toronto, Rysia Andrade (she/her), Box Office Manager, shared how The Isabel identified a strategic opportunity: transitioning rental clients away from running their own ticketing through platforms like Eventbrite and Zeffy and instead moving presenters onto a centralized ticketing service managed through Spektrix.

Incentivizing presenters with assigned seating

A key turning point came when The Isabel updated its seating maps and made a strategic decision about assigned seating:

This change became the single most effective incentive for moving external presenters onto the centralized box office system in Spektrix. With a unified seating map and a consistent booking journey, patrons could rely on a more accessible, predictable experience – regardless of which organization programmed the event.

Once they saw how much their audiences cared about clear seating and a straightforward booking process, presenters quickly recognized the value of the centralized system. In-house, the team saw fewer confused patrons and fewer operational challenges caused by mismatched seat assignments.

Rental sales are now an increasingly important revenue stream for The Isabel, which processed $48,500 in gross sales from rental ticketing in the last quarter of 2025. Centralized rental ticketing became a practical way to support audience engagement while strengthening long-term financial sustainability.

By consolidating all events into one system, The Isabel and its rental clients gained a clearer understanding of who attends what – and why. Since switching to Spektrix two years ago, The Isabel has had the connected data to analyze patron behaviors and preferences and understand what matters to each segment of their audience.

With a greater proportion of rental ticketing taking place through Spektrix, they are building an ever-richer database to identify patterns across organizations, genres, and venues.

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This unified view of audience data unlocks direct benefits for presenters:

• Lookalike audiences: The ticketing team can use audience segmentation to identify patrons likely to be interested in similar events, helping presenters grow attendance
• Shared contact preferences: Consent and contact permissions are captured consistently and up front, supporting compliance with data protection regulations and providing clarity about what information can be shared
• Targeted pre-event emails: Rental companies can opt in to personalized pre-event emails that include their own imagery, upsells, and donation asks alongside essential venue information, helping them build deeper relationships with their audiences

Rysia described this as a step toward a more connected local arts sector. As more events move into the system, Kingston-based arts organizations can better understand how audiences move between venues and genres – something that was impossible when each group used a different ticketing tool.

For organizations exploring similar approaches, our guide to audience segmentation models shares practical ways to turn connected data into more targeted campaigns.

Costs are a little higher than they are on a tool like Eventbrite, but most promoters are excited about the potential for increased visibility and higher sales.

This combined insight supports The Isabel’s long-term vision: ticketing offsite events across the community, bringing more presenters into a shared ecosystem and strengthening the city’s cultural infrastructure. They have begun pitching this to several organizations and received excited responses, with offsite ticketing beginning in earnest in 2026.

The Isabel built a detailed menu of services and fees to provide presenters with clarity and choice. Their menu includes core, affordable administration fees for ticketing, plus optional upgrades for custom passes, membership tools, and additional marketing opportunities.

A flexible menu of services

Presenters can choose from options including newsletter placements, bespoke e-blasts, social media posts, and digital or physical signage – helping them grow attendance for their own events and providing a vital new revenue stream for The Isabel.

Most popular of all is the ability to use promoter logins in the Spektrix partner company portal to view real-time sales figures and access detailed seating plan reports whenever they are needed. For many rental clients, this replaced daily calls to the box office, providing better visibility and saving time on both sides. Rental companies describe the portal as a “mini sales channel” they can check anytime.

Real-time insight and stronger partnerships

Simple, visual reports provide maps of sold, held, and available seats and enable promoters to scale marketing efforts up or down based on targets and impact. These tools have improved transparency and trust between rental organizations and The Isabel.

Presenters no longer wait for team members to send updates, and The Isabel no longer spends time fielding small status queries. It is a more efficient partnership for everyone involved.

If you want to build on this kind of automation, take a look at these theatre marketing emails you should be automating for more ideas.

Centralizing rental ticketing through Spektrix has proven transformational for The Isabel:

• The Isabel benefits from reclaimed staff time, happier patrons, and a sustainable revenue stream backed by a clear schedule of services
• Patrons benefit from a consistent, accessible experience – whether they are attending a university production, a community choir, or a touring festival
• Presenters benefit from clearer insights, reliable access to shared audience data, and targeted communication opportunities that help them reach the right audiences

Perhaps even more importantly, The Isabel is now equipped to extend this model into the wider community. As Rysia and her team look toward ticketing offsite events, they are building a citywide network where organizations of all sizes can access the same professional, centralized ticketing service – all powered by Spektrix.