smarter touring - starting the conversation

---

On Weednesday 4 February 2026 we kicked off a sector-wide exploration of how technology and collaboration could help solve some of the systemic challenges facing mid-scale touring. 

In a free and informal 45-minute webinar, special guest provocateur Patrick Morsman from Tixly helped us explore what’s working elsewhere (and what could be possible in the UK) to make smarter touring a reality.

During the Smarter Touring Tech webinar I mentioned various technical resources that could be used to streamline operations; planning, ticketing, website, customer experience, epos for bars and restaurants.

Using the different levels (or perspectives) I was illustrating:

High Level

At this high level you could have a ticketing system like Tixly, that serves many venue organisations, thus saving them money and sharing expertise. The example I gave was of Cultuur Connect in Belgium, who serve around 50 venues.

A centralised calendar displaying what shows are booked, where and when, could be built and fed by a number of planning systems, e.g. Yesplan, Artifax, Crescat and Eventotron.

In addition, Eventotron has a mechanism for artists or touring companies to register their work for consideration by the venue organisation.

Venue Level

The planning systems above can be used in combination with ticketing systems such as Tixly, Spektrix and Ticketsolve and the information can flow automatically through to your website using a website as a service provider like CultureSuite or Basker. There are more off-the-shelf website plugins like Jeero to help a standard WordPress website sync with your ticketing system.

CultureSuite has a good overview of this integrated approach in their case study, here.

Touring Company Level

As already mentioned, aggregated views created by connecting venue planning calendars to a centralised hub could provide a great benefit to the touring companies, drawing data from those systems mentioned above.

Using systems that feed deal sheets generated in Excel, like Yeplan and others can, could make the whole accounting and payment process much more transparent.  We heard at the initial meeting of LTTA how this was a real pain point for touring companies who weren’t given enough information as to how calculations had been made.

Analysis of a more comprehensive dataset at an aggregated level could help with pricing, demographic matching etc.