Tixly has put refund protection inside its own checkout and given venues a cut of the fee. The Icelandic ticketing company, which sells for concert halls and theatres across Europe, North America and Australia, has white-labelled Protect Group's product as "Order protection" and named Protect Group a preferred partner. The buyer pays for it. The venue earns a share. Nobody has said how big the share is.
The announcement landed on 23 September 2026 and was reported the same day by TheTicketingBusiness. The pitch is that the option appears in the existing Tixly buying journey with no redesign and no separate technical setup for venue teams, and that Protect Group handles the whole refund journey afterwards, from application through customer support to payout. The box office never touches it.
What the product actually does
A buyer reaching checkout can upgrade their order to a refundable booking. If something later goes wrong, they apply directly to Protect Group rather than to the venue. Tixly's material cites more than eighteen covered reasons, and Protect Group's own integration page expands the list to include illness, injury, travel disruption, redundancy and pre-existing medical conditions, alongside a broader catch-all for genuine unforeseen circumstances, all subject to terms and supporting evidence.
Hrefna Sif Jonsdottir, managing director of Tixly, positioned it as a way for cultural venues to improve the audience experience and strengthen revenue without creating more work for their teams. Hayley Fowler-Rimell, director of strategic sales and platform growth at Protect Group, said Tixly understands the commercial and operational needs of theatres, concert halls and cultural venues.
One wrinkle worth flagging, because it is a real difference between two published descriptions rather than a quibble. Both press releases describe buyers having the option to upgrade. Tixly's own integration page describes it as appearing as an opt-out option. Those are not the same product from the buyer's side, and for a paid add-on that distinction is exactly the one consumer regulators have been getting interested in. Whichever it turns out to be, an organiser evaluating this should ask and get the answer in writing.
Who pays, and who gets paid
The mechanics are stated plainly by both parties, which is more than you get from most add-on partnerships. Venues keep 100% of the original ticket revenue and earn a share of every protection fee sold. So the attendee funds it, the venue takes commission on it, and Protect Group carries the operational load and the claims.
What nobody publishes is the number. Not the commission rate, not the protection fee as a percentage of ticket price, not the claim approval rate, not who underwrites the risk. Protect Group says it offered protection on more than $7 billion in bookings during 2025 and works with over 400 partners across more than 100 countries, and it has done this before in exactly this market: it went live with Ticketsolve in May 2025 under the name Ticketsolve Protect, in a partnership Protect Group's own March 2026 release described as boosting ancillary revenue.
An ancillary revenue stream is a lovely phrase for a line item your attendee pays and you collect a slice of. That can be a genuinely good deal for everybody. It is still worth saying out loud what it is before you decide.
What this means for event organisers
The thing to notice is not refund protection. Refund protection is old, well understood and frequently welcome, especially for a theatre selling a single date months ahead. The thing to notice is the shape of the deal, because this shape is spreading.
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Platforms are increasingly monetising the checkout rather than the ticket. A protection upsell, a carbon offset, an insurance product, a delay guarantee, a priority-entry upgrade: each is a separate fee, each is paid by the attendee, and each generates a commission the organiser can book as revenue. The all-in price your attendee sees keeps drifting upward, and the drift is no longer coming only from the booking fee you already argue about.
Three questions worth asking before you switch one of these on.
Is it opt-in or opt-out, and can you change it? A pre-ticked box converts far better and it is also the version most likely to generate complaints and regulatory attention. Find out which one you are shipping and whether the setting is yours.
What happens when a claim is refused? The refusal arrives from a company your attendee has never heard of, about a purchase they made from you. The commission comes to you either way. Your box office will field the phone call regardless of who is contractually responsible.
What is the commission, in writing, per transaction? A revenue share nobody will quantify is not a revenue line, it is a hope.
Where this sits in the pricing conversation
Here is the context the releases do not supply. Every one of these products exists because the ticket itself has become a thin margin fought over by regulators, resale caps and price-conscious buyers. The add-on is where the margin went. That is a rational response to a squeezed market, and organisers who use it well can genuinely fund things with it.
But it is also worth noticing what it does to the shape of your cost base. Ancillary commission is variable revenue on top of a variable fee, and variable stacked on variable is very hard to forecast. If you are trying to answer the question "what will ticketing cost me next year if we grow 20%", every percentage-based line in the stack is a line you cannot answer without guessing at volume.
eventcloud takes the opposite approach on the platform line, and it is worth stating factually rather than as a boast. eventcloud is priced per user, from one, at $125 per user per month, and that covers unlimited events, unlimited tickets and unlimited registrations. Payments run through the organiser's own Stripe account. There is no add-on marketplace to take a cut of, and there is no white-label add-on to buy at any price. The subscription reads the same at 500 tickets or 50,000, which means next year's budget line is a number you already know rather than a function of how well you sell.
The honest limits. eventcloud does not do virtual or hybrid events. If your season is built around streamed performances, this is not the tool for it. eventcloud also has no refund-protection product and no insurance partner, so if an upsell like the Tixly one is something you actively want, that is a reason to look elsewhere, and saying so is more useful than pretending otherwise. For an in-person conference, trade show or gala that wants the whole cost of ticketing to be one predictable line, the pricing page is the short version, and the Eventbrite comparison is the long one.
