How does this program work? If you have a haunted attraction, you setup your account with ScreamPass, and you decide what tickets you want to make available online, and what price they will be. There is no setup fee to sell your tickets through them. Once you get what tickets you will sell and how much you will charge established, you place a "ScreamPass purchasing button" on your website. This button will direct your customers to the secure portion of screampass.com, where they are given the ticketing options you have selected and can purchase the tickets online using a major credit card. Consumers are prompted through the printing process and an "e-ticket" is printed up on their home printer. This "e-ticket" contains all of the pertinent event information, ticket specific information, banner advertising as well as a randomly generated ticket authenticator number and corresponding bar code. An on-screen confirmation and an automatically generated email confirmation is sent to the email registered by the consumer during the purchase process. This auto email serves as a receipt for their purchase and also provides details on securing a ticket re-print should a printing error have occurred. They can then redeem the printed ticket just as you would a regular ticket sold at the event. Members of this program have 24 hour access to their online sales reports, so that they are able to track down the success of their ticket sales, which makes this more than just a credit card processing program.

There is, however a percentage of the ticket price which is the service fee. This year it was 15% of the ticket price. You have the option on whether you will pay the service fee and take advantage of the banner advertising program, which allows you to "sell" advertising spots to sponsors on the tickets, or you could have the customer pay the service fee. For example, if you charge $10 for a general admission ticket and decide to pay the charge yourself, you will be making $8.50 off every ticket sold, and paying the 15% fee yourself, and with the banner advertising program, if you get just three sponsors to buy space on your tickets at, say, $.50 per ticket, then your sponsors have already paid the service fee for you and you have made your full $10. If you choose to let the consumer pay the fee, then instead of the customer paying a total of $10 for the ticket, then they would pay $11.50, in which they would be made aware of the fact that the extra $1.50 was a seperate charge from the $10 that your haunted attraction is getting. If the consumer pays the fee, you do not get to take advantage of the banner advertising program though. For the 2003 season, ScreamPass is seeking out other oppurtunities and strategies that would allow them to lower the fee structure, making it more competitive for haunted attractions to be able to take advantage of.

This program can be viewed as simply an extension of a haunt's group sales or coupon program. If you discount tickets for larger groups, haunts do that because they want to capture new business they would NOT otherwise have had. This program, with the haunt paying the service fee (netting $8.50 on a $10 ticket) is still probably more revenue for the haunt than if the purchase were made by a group. Often, haunts will give even a bigger discount to a large group as it is. Also, haunts spend real dollars on printing and distributing print coupons. They're also hard to keep track of and credit at the box office. If you eliminiate the coupons and offer the reduced fee by directing consumers to go to their website (which they've already invested money in), and to buy a ticket online in advance and the haunt will pay their service fee. It's cheaper, easier and saves time that haunters often don't have. "Would you invest $1.50 to acquire a brand new customer that you might not otherwise have had? And you only pay the $1.50 service fee if a ticket is actually purchased AFTER you have collected the full $10.00 ticket price. That's an $8.50 profit on a $1.50 investment - a 566% return on simply taking the time to learn more and enroll in the ScreamPass.Com Program." explains Rich Majka

For those who may be skeptical of using this new "e-ticketing" service, Majka explains, "The program may not be for everyone. It’s been designed to be flexible and to be able to adapt to the varied needs of haunts of all sizes from anywhere in the country. We encourage everyone to take the time to fully review the site and learn about the many features of the program so that they could decide for themselves if it could help grow their sales. Often people focus on just one aspect of a new program such as this and they end up not seeing how it can fit into the big picture. The fact is that the internet is here to stay. The target audience for haunted houses buy large volumes of entertainment (music, sporting events, concert tickets, movie tickets) via the internet. What risk is there to join the program and set it up so that the consumer pays the service fee ? The program is designed to offer the member control and aims to not only sophisticate but simplify the process so that haunters can spend more time doing what they really want to do - haunt. The backbone of this industry has always been innovation - innovations that help improve the overall quality of the customer’s experience. The ScreamPass.Com E-Ticketing program is no different. "

If you have a website for your attraction and have thought about selling your tickets online, or even if you don't have a website, but have a haunted attraction, the people at ScreamPass will create a small "mini-site" for your attraction where you can have information on your attraction and sell your tickets through them. There is no setup fees involved, just the 15% of your ticket price, and even at that, you can choose to pay the 15% or your customers can. There is a minimum of $6 for ticket prices, but most attractions today would have no worries with the minimum price. Rich explains, "....We offer various pricing and ticketing strategies to our clients so that they can maximize the program but ultimately it is their choice as to what tickets, how much and how they are redeemed. Members maintain the control and the final responsibility to their customer."

The internet is here to stay, and let's face it, a website is probably one of the most valuable tools any haunted attraction can have. It lets your customers get all the information they need for your attraction at the click of a button. Why not maximize the potential of the internet and allow consumers to purchase tickets for your attraction. They are able to print it out in their own homes, they can redeem it at the attraction with no worries whether or not a haunt will "sell out" before they get there. With ScreamPass, you don't pay to sign up with them, you increase your horizon for potential customers and even if you do sign up and you don't sell any tickets online, what do you have to lose? You're making profit either way. With other e-ticketing services, there's usually a setup charge, which could cost you alot of money if you don't sell your tickets. The "haunted attraction season" only lasts maybe 6 weeks at the most. Why not try to make the most of these few weeks? ScreamPass is definitely the easiest and most cost effective way to achieve this. It's a win-win situation any way you look at it.