Expedia launches concert ticket sales platform

Expedia.com, one of the world’s most popular travel booking sites, has moved into concert ticketing through a partnership with resale site TicketNetwork.

Expedia, which already offers airline tickets, hotel reservations, car hire, tours and tickets to attractions such as museums and galleries, has launched Event Tickets, which adds secondary-market tickets to more than 95,000 concerts, sports matches and other live events to its offering for US customers.

“We know travellers are looking for unique and authentic experiences while in-destination,” says Jen O’Twomney, vice-president of Expedia’s Local Expert division.

“Adding event tickets to our product offering makes all the sense in the world”

“They want to catch a baseball game at a stadium they’ve never been to, or see a show that isn’t playing in their hometown. There’s also a growing trend to build entire trips around events, to attend a music festival, follow a specific artist on tour or root for your team at an away game.

“Adding event tickets to our product offering makes all the sense in the world and gives us another way to help travellers get the most out of their vacation.”

Expedia’s ticketing debut follows the launch of primary platform Ryanair Tickets by the eponymous Irish low-cost airline last November.

Photo: © Travelarz / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 PL)

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Relive 5 decades of festival lineups with Playlister

With the 2017 festival season now in full swing, travel website Expedia has revamped its online Playlister tool, which allows Spotify users to compile playlists based on the line-ups of five decades’ worth of music festivals.

Featuring a database of 27,914 events dating back to the 1960s, Playlister leverages Spotify to create a playlist of each festival’s popular artists and tracks – or the most obscure – “allowing listeners to fondly recall the good times”, says Expedia.

Each individual festival is also provided with a ‘mainstream score’, detailing how much they have grown in popularity since their inception.

Here’s a few examples, using the most popular acts at Glastonbury ’84 (a classic) and the most obscure tracks at Woodstock:

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