Growing revenue through rental ticketing services at The Isabel

Kingston, Ontario

Isabel Bader Centre for the
Performing Arts
Queen's University

University Arts Centre

Challenge

Promoters and outside companies used separate ticketing systems for rentals, causing confusion for patrons and limiting revenue opportunities for the Isabel and its partner companies.

Solution

The Isabel centralized rental ticketing through Spektrix. They introduced a clear service and fee structure for rental companies and will soon begin ticketing offsite events citywide.

Outcome

By unifying ticketing under one platform, The Isabel:

Improved patron experience by providing a consistent purchase pathway, enabling assigned seating, and sending relevant pre-event communications
Provided better visibility to promoters, with access to seating plan reports and real-time access to sales data
Enabled shared contact preferences, giving patrons control over their own data while building positive partnerships with promoters
Created a new revenue stream - and supported smaller arts organizations in their community - by providing ticketing services for rental companies and offsite venues

A string quartet stand onstage at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, silhouetted under bright lights

Located on the shores of Lake Ontario in Kingston, Ontario, The Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts is a major hub for arts and culture in the region. Operated by Queen’s University, the 90,000-square-foot venue includes a 567-seat performance hall, a flexible black box studio, recital hall, film and media studios, a screening room, galleries, and a sound stage. It serves both the university community and Kingston’s wider arts scene, hosting everything from classical music and theatre to student productions and independent festivals.

At the 2025 US Spektrix Hubs 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 all presenters onto a centralized ticketing service managed through Spektrix.

This shift allowed Rysia and her team to unify ticketing, improve patron experience, and enable promoters to better understand and engage local audiences. It also aligned with a longer-term goal to support arts groups across Kingston by offering ticketing for offsite events in churches and smaller venues without their own box office infrastructure.

The Isabel needed a way to offer consistent, reliable ticketing across all events in the venue.

For years, rental companies arrived at The Isabel with their own ticketing platforms. While workable for presenters, this created challenges for patrons. Different seating maps, inconsistent ticket delivery, and mismatched customer communications made it difficult for audience members 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 system each promoter used.

When The Isabel began updating its own seating maps, 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 own 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.

“We decided to cut off assigned seating for any third-party box offices outside of our own. The only way to access an assigned seat in our venue was to go through our box office.

That was the most successful move we could have made to incentivize promoters to actually use our box office."

Rysia Andrade

Box Office Manager

This change became the single most effective incentive for moving external presenters onto the centralized box office system. With a unified seating map and consistent customer 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. 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.

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 earlier, The Isabel has had the data to analyze patron behaviors and preferences and really understand what matters to each segment of their audience. With a greater proportion of rental ticketing taking place through Spektrix, they’re building an ever-richer database to identify patterns across organizations, genres, and venues.

The auditorium of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts, a warm, wooden space designed for superb acoustics

This unified view unlocks direct benefits for presenters:

Lookalike audiences: The box office team can identify patrons likely to be interested in similar events, helping presenters grow attendance.
Shared contact preferences: Consent and contact permissions are captured consistently and upfront, ensuring 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.

Rysia described this as a step toward a more connected local 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. 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 even more presenters into a shared ecosystem and strengthening the city’s cultural infrastructure. They’ve begun pitching this to several organizations, and received excited responses, with offsite ticketing beginning in earnest in 2026.

Presenters feel more in control of their ticketing - without creating more work for the box office team.

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

Most popular of all is the ability for promoters to log in through the Spektrix partner company portal, view real-time sales figures, and download their own reports. 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. Simple, visual reports provide maps of sold, held, and available seats, and enable them to scale marketing efforts up or down based on targets and impact.

These tools have improved transparency and trust. Presenters no longer wait for team members to send updates, and The Isabel no longer spends time fielding small status queries.

It’s a more efficient partnership for everyone involved.

“The companies that are renting our services now feel a sense of agency over their own ticket tracking, and they can pull things whenever they want as opposed to waiting on an auto email or even worse, having to call box office every day to ask what their ticket sales are.

They can download their own reports at will or on demand. They feel a sense of agency over their own ticket tracking, and it’s really cut down on our team’s time."

Rysia Andrade

Box Office Manager

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’re attending a university production, a community choir, or a touring festival.
Presenters benefit from clearer insights, reliable access to 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’re building a citywide network where organizations of all sizes can access the same professional, centralized ticketing service - all powered by Spektrix.

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Giving rental companies real-time visibility through promoter logins and seating plan reports

Presenters feel more in control of their ticketing - without creating more work for the box office team

Challenge

Solution

Outcome

Building a centralized ticketing service that puts patrons first

Using shared data to help rental companies understand and reach their audiences

Giving rental companies real-time visibility through promoter logins and seating plan reports

Centralizing rental ticketing through Spektrix has proven transformational for The Isabel

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