Parktheater Eindhoven presents nearly 500 performances each season across its three in-house venues. It also programs performances at Natlab and Pand P, its smaller partner venue for emerging artists. In 2025, a jury from the Association of Independent Theater Producers named Parktheater Theater of the Year in the Netherlands, citing the quality of the entire theater experience.
At Parktheater, that experience begins long before the first note is played or the first word is spoken. Irene Arts, Head of Ticketing and Visitor Services, has been helping shape that experience for 27 years.
No scanners at the door
When visitors arrive at Parktheater Eindhoven for a performance, they are not stopped at the entrance by staff with scanners. The theater does not check tickets at the door. It has not done so for almost twenty years. In the Netherlands, that makes Parktheater unique.
The decision grew out of how things used to work. Back then, five or six staff members would stand at the entrance while visitors waited in line behind a rope before being allowed in.
As a visitor, you were standing there waiting, sometimes in the rain. Whether it was your first time, your tenth visit that year, or you had been coming for 30 years, there was no room for a chat or a quick explanation, because tickets had to be checked. Everyone was stressed before the evening had even begun. So we chose open doors.
-- Irene Arts
--- Head of Ticketing and Service, Parktheater
That does not mean there is no control at all. Ticketmatic shows the team exactly which seats have been sold and which have not. Ushers move through the venue and can approach someone if something does not add up. But the entrance itself stays open. Visitors can walk straight to the bar or to their seats, without waiting in line.
“And if someone somehow manages to get in for free and has the night of their life,” Irene adds with a laugh, “then honestly, how wonderful is that?”
A team that looks beyond tickets
Irene’s team consists of eight staff members, supported by temporary staff and evening students from Eindhoven University of Technology. Ticket sales are only one part of their work. They also welcome artists and performing companies, manage restaurant reservations, and monitor social media during and after performances.
They do this through Coosto, a tool that brings together messages and mentions from Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp in a single overview. When someone posts something during or after a performance, the team can pick it up immediately. A staff member can alert the hospitality team about a complaint or respond directly to a question. Irene gives an example:
If someone says their cappuccino is lukewarm, or that they feel a draft in the auditorium, you can act on it right away. If you only see it the next day, the moment has passed.”
-- Irene Arts
--- Head of Ticketing and Service, Parktheater
More and more ticketing questions are also coming in through WhatsApp, from visitors who would rather send a message than make a phone call. That is why the team actively keeps track of all incoming messages. In the past, social media replies were handled by the communications department. Today, they are a natural part of the ticketing team’s day-to-day work.
The box office as a help desk
Parktheater keeps its box office open every day from 8:30 a.m. until the start of the performance, Monday through Saturday. It continues to do so even as more and more theaters are limiting or phasing out their physical box offices. The reason is simple: about twenty percent of visitors still buy their tickets at the box office or by phone.
After Covid, we thought the box office might disappear. But so many people kept coming in. That need was still there: being able to speak to someone, to ask a question. People really appreciate that.
-- Irene Arts
--- Head of Ticketing and Service, Parktheater
At the same time, the nature of those interactions is changing. Increasingly, visitors come in with questions about buying tickets online. Someone cannot log in, has a duplicate account, or gets stuck during the payment process. “Your role is becoming more and more like that of a help desk,” Irene says.
That requires a different set of skills. But the accessibility of the system helps. “When I put a student behind ticketmatic,” Irene says, “they can move through the steps quite logically, even if they do not know the platform yet.”
Marketing and ticketing as one front
At Parktheater, marketing and ticketing work closely together. They use the cultural audience segmentation models developed by Rotterdam Festivals and align their campaign choices accordingly. Ticketmatic data flows into dashboards displayed on a large screen by the coffee machine: daily sales, sales by genre, and annual ticket sales, with curves for the past four years. Everyone in the organization works from the same numbers, and those numbers are highly visible.
The ticketing team is also actively involved at campaign level. Irene has defended one principle for years: do not introduce discounts just because a performance is not selling as well as expected.
That is basically punishing your audience. Everyone wants audiences to buy early. But with late discounts, you basically tell people: if you had waited, you would have paid less.
-- Irene Arts
--- Head of Ticketing and Service, Parktheater
Instead, Parktheater works with early-booking benefits for visitors who decide quickly, and it tests Pay What You Want for performances where it wants to lower the threshold. The choice of “Want” rather than the more common “Can” is deliberate. “We felt ‘Can’ was a little stereotypical,” Irene explains.
From ticket sales to visitor experience
At Parktheater Eindhoven, ticketing and visitor services are inseparable. They come together in one team that helps visitors not only with their tickets, but with the full experience around their visit.
You see that in the fact that visitors are not checked at the entrance, that the box office remains open every day, that the ticketing team also answers questions on social media, and that it is involved in campaign planning. Ticketmatic supports this way of working with a system that is easy to use, while also providing the data and flexibility a professional theater needs.
The choices Parktheater makes around visitor experience are not accidental. They are the result of an organization that consistently chooses radical hospitality.
