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FSM


electronic tickets on your phone or a hard ticket. Because we don’t have a home club, there


are new customers coming in all the time. So you’re constantly educating customers about how to get into the venue quickest. Whether it’s a concert in the round,


Q: How about the services offered inside the venue? A: You’ve got to move away from a hole in the wall that’s serving you one type of draught beer. While this is a Budweiser house, they offer their full range. There’s a Camden bar offering the craft beers. We’ve now got two pubs, the Lioness and


the Three Lions. People are looking for that food experience and selection. They know it’s a big stadium, they know it holds 90,000, but they want to feel like they’re walking into a gastro pub like you’d find on any regular high street.


Q: Aside from security, what are other challenges for an operator of a venue of this size? A: Obviously, ticketing is evolving very quickly. The standard ticketing process of ordering a hard ticket and having it delivered in the post is still there, people still like a souvenir, especially if it’s for something like an FA Cup final. Other people are now looking for


electronic tickets. We’re now with Apple, so you can use the Apple Wallet. It’s about exploring new technologies and educating the public on it. Now, for the Emirates FA Cup final, you can choose between print-at-home,


whether it’s an NFL game, it’s an amazing feeling, for the customer and the staff who work here. The staff buy into it, and you get the same staff coming back all the time. They work hard, they really do, but they’re in an environment where people are enjoying themselves, and there’s nothing better. To be around people who are having a brilliant time, it rubs off on you all the time.


Q: As far as crowd management is concerned, are you looking into moving that communication onto the customer’s device at some point? A: We’re looking at a crowd safety app at the moment, one for our team on the ground initially. We have 1,500 stewards, and another 2,500 to 3,000 food and beverage people. So, on an event day, we ramp up to around 5,000 event-day staff. When you’re doing briefing notes for all those people, that’s a lot of paper. Environmentally you don’t want to be producing that much paper. What is more, your briefing document


is usually ready two days prior to an event, but what if something changes? You’re then relying on word of mouth and your staff listening and taking notes. The app will have a briefing document, which is live. It will also help our transient staff, who


may not know about the exact location of each food stall, to point customers in the right direction. That technology will then, slowly but


surely, be rolled out to the customer. Any customer app will have to support what I call sofa-to-sofa experience. I can buy my ticket on there, I can plan my journey, and find my way around the venue. I think, eventually, we’ll move on to a point where your ticket becomes live only once you’re getting close to the venue, to stop the selling-on of tickets. The technological side of it is by no means


finished, it’s always going to grow, but for venue operators it’s about understanding how it can benefit them. If you can move people where you want them to move, rather than where they think they should move, that’s huge, because you’re stopping the cross-flow of people on concourses.


Q: Which company are you working with on the app? A: It’s called Crowdsafe. They’re developing the app with us. We looked at a few that are currently used in other stadiums, but they were more for a football stadium with an in-house crowd who all knew what they were doing. Finding one that is dealing with this transient crowd all the time was difficult, we demand a lot more of it. The Crowdsafe app is made by a company called Approved Technology, who have been really good at coming to our venue and shadowing our team for a number of events to understand it. They haven’t tried to deliver this off the shelf. They came in to understand the nuts and bolts of our business.


Q: Is sustainability a big thing at Wembley Stadium? A: Yes it is. We have a group called FAST, which is the FA Sustainability Team. They’re Continued on page 20


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