Empress Rooms Limited
Case Study

The Client:

The Empress Building and Ballrooms is a grand and fabulous historic venue that has played host to all manner of dinners, dances and live performances for almost a century, and after substantial investment, has re-opened its doors to host special events and private hire functions once again.

The Brief:

The first thing that Empress Rooms Limited needed support with was setting up a merchant account.

Gala Technology explained how the payments eco-system works and supported Empress Rooms Limited with their application for a merchant account with an acquirer, to ensure the rates, settlement times and service would meet expectation.

Empress Rooms Limited stated that they wanted to be able to process secure and PCI DSS compliant remote payments for their events and functions, but also needed a way of pricing and managing the ticket sales for such events.

The Solution:

With the brief in hand, the innovative development team at Gala Technology began work on an exciting new ticketing feature to work alongside their existing multi-award-winning SOTpay – Pay By Link solution.

This new development enabled Empress Rooms Limited to build a list of forthcoming events, set pricing and place restrictions on the number of tickets that could be purchased to ensure the safety of guests at their popular functions, such as Northern Soul nights, White-Collar Boxing and Elvis and Ed Sheeran tribute nights.

The platform also creates a unique URL for each event, which enabled Empress Rooms Limited to advertise their events on social media platforms. Interested parties could then access the URL and land on a customised hosted page, to ascertain further information about the event and if desired, purchase tickets.

"We are amazed at the payment knowledge and technical agility which Gala Technology have demonstrated to help our business not only set up and process secure payments, but to support with our entire event and ticket management requirements. The ability to advertise our events, coupled with seamless payments has resulted in a number of sell out events, as we continue to bring this historic venue back to its former glory"

John-Joe Irwin
Director at Empress Room Limited

Event and Ticket Management:

Once the payee has selected the amount of tickets required and made a successful payment they are automatically sent their tickets via email, complete with optional QR code to manage entry on the door.

The 'Thank You' email and the actual ticket can be designed to suit the event / venue requirements. Advertisements can be added to the tickets, plus there is the option of adding other attachments to the email such as forthcoming events, maps & directions, terms & conditions etc.