Instant Ticketing

A California-bound business executive walked into a branch of the First National City Bank in Manhattan last week and picked up a pair of tickets for a Hollywood Bowl concert. A Manhattan-bound Angeleno bought tickets for the Broadway hit Oh! Calcutta! at a Beverly Hills hotel. Both made their purchases through computer networks that are striving to bring the box office closer to the increasingly choosy buyer.

Two companies--Ticket Reservation Systems, Inc., of New York, and Computicket Corp., a subsidiary of Computer Sciences Corp. of Los Angeles--are currently fighting for a potentially lucrative ticket market with much the same type of operation. Participating entertainment enterprises like theaters and sports arenas are linked by sales outlets in such spots as railroad stations, travel agencies, department stores and even supermarkets. At most of those locations, buyers tell a sales clerk what event they want to see and when. By pushing buttons on a console, the clerk queries a regional computer's "memory bank" and gets an instant reading on what seats are available. Customers then can have their tickets printed electronically on the spot. The T.R.S. Ticketron system charges a flat rate of 25-c- per ticket for local events. Manhattan ticket brokers normally charge more--$1.50 per seat.

Computer ticketing is still in its infancy, but its convenience is beginning to catch the public's fancy. After 15 months of operations, Ticketron, the bigger of the two systems, has terminals in more than 300 locations from coast to coast. It offers seats to a wide variety of entertainment, including the U.S. Open Tennis matches in Forest Hills, N.Y., the Philadelphia Folk Festival in Old Pool Farm, Pa., the home games of six major-league baseball teams and most events at Manhattan's new Madison Square Garden. According to President John Quinn Jr., T.R.S. now sells 1,000,000 tickets a month and expects to break even by late 1970.

Expanding the system requires large amounts of capital investment. Under the direction of Chairman Thomas W. Moore, a former head of ABC Television, T.R.S. has already committed itself to spend $22 million to buy or lease computers and terminals from Control Data Corp. of Minneapolis, and plans to spend another $15 million. Last week, for an undisclosed sum, Control Data in turn acquired 50% of T.R.S.'s stock.

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