Fans trust the platform they are buying from twelve times more than they trust an artificial recommendation. In Tixel's Future of Ticketing Report, released this month, 49% of Australians said they trusted the ticketing and event platforms they bought through directly. Just 4% said they trusted AI or automated recommendations when deciding whether to attend something. Your checkout is your credibility.
What the report actually found
The study, subtitled The Live Equation 2030, was launched at a Melbourne venue in mid-September and covered by Variety Australia before the wider trade press picked it up on 22 September. The headline number is the fraud one: roughly one in six Australians, 17%, say they were the victim of ticket fraud in the past twelve months.
That is bad, and it is also the best result of the three markets studied. The equivalent figures were 29% in the United States and 25% in the United Kingdom. Australians were also less likely to have overpaid on resale: 38%, against 49% in the UK and 56% in the US. Tixel reads the gap as evidence that tougher Australian resale law is doing something, which is a reasonable reading, though a single year of survey data is not a regression analysis.
Two more numbers matter more to a B2B organiser than the fraud rate. Seventy-seven per cent said they would rather pay more for a verified, guaranteed ticket than gamble on a cheaper one. And 65% said knowing they could resell a ticket if plans changed was what gave them the confidence to buy it in the first place.
The finding that should change your marketing plan
Everyone in events has spent 2026 being told that AI assistants are the new front door. The report does not exactly contradict that: 47% of Australians think AI will make it easier to find events and experiences. But discovery and decision are different jobs, and on the decision only 4% trust the machine.
So the practical shape is this. AI may increasingly be how someone hears that your summit exists. It is almost certainly not what convinces them to spend £600 and two days on it. The thing that does that job, by a factor of twelve, is the page where the money changes hands looking like it belongs to you.
Discovery can be borrowed. Trust cannot. The only surface where 49% of your buyers already believe you is the one you control.
Which makes an unbranded, third-party-looking checkout an expensive place to save money. If the URL changes to a company nobody has heard of at the payment step, you have introduced a stranger at the exact moment the buyer was deciding whether to believe you.
Who paid for the research, and why that matters
Worth saying plainly, because nobody else has: Tixel is a ticket resale platform. This is its report. Co-founder Jason Webb's conclusion, that fans get caught out on social media and unregulated sites rather than on verified resale platforms with price caps, is also a description of the product Tixel sells.
Tired of Fee Announcements? Go Flat
eventcloud charges one subscription with no per-ticket fees, so platform news stops being budget news.
That does not make the numbers wrong. Vendor research is often the only research anyone bothers to fund in this industry, and the sample spans three countries with consistent methodology across them. It does mean you should treat the framing with the same scepticism you would apply to any survey where the answer happens to be the sponsor. Read the percentages, discount the conclusions, and note that the 4% AI figure is if anything inconvenient for a company whose growth story runs through digital discovery.
The group chat is now part of your conversion funnel
The least reported finding is the most operationally useful. Twenty-two per cent of Australians will not buy a ticket until somebody else commits first. Twenty-four per cent are the person in the group who does the organising and the buying. Among Gen Z, nearly one in three wait for a friend to lock in, and 34% said they would not attend an event alone at all.
Promoters at the launch described the consequence as a collapse in urgency, with one music manager saying up to 30% of tickets can now sell on the day of the show. Conference organisers will recognise the shape even if the numbers differ: the registration curve has been sliding later for years, and a fortnight of frantic late sign-ups is now normal rather than a crisis.
Two responses follow. First, make the group path easy: a registration flow that lets one person book for four without four separate transactions removes the coordination problem rather than waiting it out. Second, stop treating a late surge as an operations emergency. Badge stock, catering guarantees and registration forms should assume a fat tail, because that is now the shape of demand.
Where the money question lands
Here is the part that connects the trust finding to the invoice. If your buyers trust your own checkout more than anything else in the funnel, you want as many of them through it as possible. A platform that charges you a percentage of every ticket charges you more for doing exactly that.
On eventcloud the subscription is $125 per user per month and it does not move with volume. Unlimited events, unlimited tickets, unlimited registrations: the bill for 500 attendees and the bill for 50,000 are the same subscription, and money lands in your own Stripe account rather than a platform balance. Driving more people to the channel they already trust is not a billing event. The detail is on the pricing page.
The honest edges. eventcloud is priced per user, from one user, so the seat count is the variable rather than the crowd. eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If most of your programme happens on a screen with a production layer behind it, Bizzabo or vFairs will serve you better. And nothing here is a fraud product: reducing scam exposure is mostly about being the obvious official seller, not about buying software. On that, the report and this article agree.
