What Is Emotionally Intelligent Ticketing?

In my experience, there is this quiet space between intention and action. A moment when someone has decided they’re going to visit, but hasn’t yet figured out how to. Maybe they have planned the time off work, spoken to their family and rallied the troops - and now they are sat on your booking page. It is the part the happens next that matters most.

We have all been in this situation, so I don’t need to explain it too much. We’re navigating tiredness, time pressure, uncertainty and, if you're like me, a dozen tabs open at once. So booking a visit, is someone finally saying “yes” to a treat for themselves. It is one more task, buried in a busy day. Emotionally Intelligent Ticketing recognises that. The user doesn’t see intelligent flows or conversion hacks, so it’s about designing for how people actually feel when they're trying to make something joyful happen.

Ultimately, as people who design these systems, we like to imagine the ideal guest is the only one using it. Focussed, motivated, strong wifi and credit card in hand. But more often, they’re booking from a sofa (couch for my American readers), standing in the kitchen, or the front seat of a (parked) car. A sort of half-in half-out mentality. And that’s okay - it’s just that we don't usually consider that. Good ticketing doesn’t just tolerate that, it softens it. It removes the pressure instead of piling it on. So I think we need to start asking the question “what kind of journey would I want right now, as a customer”, rather than “how quickly can my customers complete the journey”.

The pressure points are very often in plain sight - a calendar that requires you to know the future, a wall of ticket types - none of which feel quite right for a family of 5 plus Grandma. A donation prompt that is just outright ugly. These are all emotional decisions, not just functional ones - and they pile up fast.

This is where the obsession with A/B testing often goes a bit rogue. Don’t get me wrong, I love some raw data, but we start optimising for clicks and completions without ever asking what the user was feeling. Did more people click the red button instead of the blue one? Great. But did they feel rushed? Confused? Pressured into it? That part never shows up in a report - it can’t. A/B testing is a powerful tool - but emotionally intelligent design knows when to use it with empathy, not instead of it. Just because Version B converted 4% better doesn’t mean it was the better experience. Sometimes the “winning” version just applied more pressure, faster. 

We actually talked about this on a recent day with some colleagues - the different ways people like to book. Some were all about speed: get the tickets done, sorted, and out the way - they can always add more later. Others preferred a more complete journey - they wanted to book everything in one go, from car parking to an animal experience. And I remember thinking, “Alright, there must be a neat middle ground. Something we can A/B test our way into. A universal sweet spot.”

But of course, that world doesn’t exist.

There is no one right way, because there is no one right kind of visitor. And the goal shouldn’t be to find the version that pleases the most people just enough. If the booking experience is meant to be the start of the visit, why are we starting with a compromise?

I’ve asked you a lot of questions there - sorry, but one more: how can we give people what they need - not just what most people will tolerate? This means flexibility. It means recognising that booking isn’t a single-path flow but a conversation with different entry points and different moods. And it means letting go of the idea that the perfect average experience is a real thing. It isn’t. Not in visitor attractions. Not in real life.

Booking is often charged with more emotion than we realise. For some people, it’s the one day the whole family is free. For others, it’s a birthday treat or a rare chance to see someone they don’t see often. That emotional weight doesn’t show up in the analytics, but it’s there. And when someone’s already carrying the pressure of making this go well, the last thing they need is to feel like they’re getting it wrong before they’ve even paid.

This is also where language starts to matter - not just the tone, but the timing and the audience. Words on a page aren’t neutral. They either calm people down or add pressure. But even the warmest line doesn’t do much if it’s shown to the wrong person at the wrong time. A comforting “Can’t wait to see you!” might be perfect for a family making a weekend plan - but feel oddly out of place for someone quickly booking a corporate site visit.

And yes, it takes two seconds for a copywriter to write a warmer confirmation line. That’s the easy part. The harder part is knowing when to say it. And to whom. Emotional intelligence in ticketing isn’t just about better words - it’s about better context. A system that adjusts the tone depending on what it senses about the user, the journey, or even the time of day - that’s where this needs to head.

Emotionally intelligent ticketing isn’t sentimental or soft. It’s practical empathy. It understands that people don’t live inside funnels. They live in the real world - busy, distracted, often stressed, sometimes excited. When we design with that in mind, everything works better. Fewer mistakes. Fewer abandoned baskets. More guests arriving are already feeling seen.

Because ticketing isn’t the admin before the experience. It is the beginning of the experience. And how it feels to book is very often how it feels to arrive.