Emirates Dubai 7s: ticketing that holds at peak

Flagship sports weekends don’t forgive flaky entry. Fans need wallet-ready passes. Ops need scanning that stays up when gates open. Organizers need a post-event picture of who showed up, not a pile of PDF tickets.

For Emirates Dubai 7s, we shipped a digital ticketing platform and companion app under real calendar pressure: buy, transfer, and store tickets in-app; QR entry at the gate; schedules and news; payments; and a post-event insights pack for demographics and venue spend.

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The challenge

Before the rebuild, the event still ran on manual PDF ticketing. That left three buyer-visible gaps:

• Fragile entry: paper/PDF flows don’t scale cleanly at peak gate volume
• Almost no usable attendee data: limited demographics, spend, or engagement signal for the next season
• Weak pre- and in-event engagement: schedules, results, and updates lived outside the ticketing experience

The brief was clear: modernize entry, keep the weekend safe under load, and leave organizers with data they could actually use.

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What we shipped

Digital ticketing & wallet

• Buy, transfer, and store passes in an in-app wallet
• Real-time QR validation at the gate
• Secure digital payments alongside ticket purchase

Event experience

• Schedules, live results, and news in one place
• Team following and fixture tracking
• Digital merchandise paths with in-person collection

Ops & insights

• Peak-hour scanning designed for concurrency, not demo traffic
• Post-event packs on demographics, engagement, and venue spend
• Cleaner fraud posture than printable PDFs

The architecture had one job above all others: hold when thousands of fans hit the gates in the same hour.

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Outcomes

The weekend ran on digital passes with measurable engagement and cleaner ops data for the next season:

• 80,000+ ticket passes distributed through the app
• 2M+ in-app interactions across the event
• 2,400+ digital payments processed
• 3,000+ tickets scanned per hour at peak

What that meant for the buyer

• Faster, more reliable entry at the busiest moments
• Attendee and spend insight instead of guesswork for planning
• A platform shape that could grow (merchandise, team following) without redoing the core

"The new ticketing platform transformed our event operations. It's user-friendly, efficient, and significantly boosted our ticket sales."
Event Director, Emirates Dubai 7s

Commercial takeaway: high-concurrency event products succeed when the sprint scope is ruthless (wallet, validation, and ops data first), then layer engagement once the gate flow is proven.