Executive of the Year Award 2018 – Vote Now

EXECUTIVE OF THE YEAR AWARD

TheTicketingBusiness Executive of the Year award will go to the leader, pioneer or visionary that has moved the ticketing sector to new heights. Awarded to the individual that has over-delivered in the past 12 months.

TheTicketingBusiness Awards are delighted to introduce our 2018 Executive of the Year Award finalists.

Voting is now closed. Thank you to the thousands of people who voted. Winners will be announced during the Awards ceremony at Emirates Old Trafford, 17 April.

Russell D’Souza, Co-Founder, SeatGeek Enterprise (USA)

Russ D’Souza is a co‐founder of SeatGeek, the leading mobile app and platform for live event tickets. Russ leads SeatGeek’s business functions, including business development and the growth of SeatGeek’s primary ticketing platform, SeatGeek Enterprise.

Prior to founding SeatGeek, Russ worked as a management consultant with Monitor Group in Boston. He is also the founder of two successful startups — Evolving Vox, a student-run furniture rental business at Dartmouth College, as well as Scribnia, a Yelp-style web application to discover bloggers and writers online. Russ graduated from Dartmouth College in 2007 with a degree in History.

Helge Hollander, CEO, Reservix/AdTicket (Germany)

Reservix is ​​a leading ticketing company in Germany with 320 employees. Amongst others the portals ADticket.de and reservix.de belong to it. Throughout Germany, Reservix serves more than 7,000 tour operators from the fields of concerts, sports, theater, tourism, tours and trade fairs.

The services offered by Reservix include the web-based ticketing system, an in-house ticket hotline, nationwide 3,000 ticket outlets, training courses, sales promotion, marketing support, CRM measures and application-friendly API solutions.

The shareholders of the companies Reservix from Freiburg and AD ticket from Frankfurt last year set up a joint venture named “Reservix Holding AG”, in which all shares of Reservix and AD ticket were contributed.

The holding company will control the entire company in the future. The Management Board of Reservix Holding AG are the previous Managing Directors of Reservix Johannes Tolle and Johannes Güntert, as well as of AD ticket’s Helge Hollander and Katrin Stahlberg.

The merger of the two companies under the Reservix Holding AG will create the second largest ticketing company in Germany.

Ashish Hemrajani, Founder & CEO, BookMyShow (India)

Ashish set up BigTree Entertainment in 1999, with a clear focus of providing cutting-edge ticketing solutions to the cinema industry. In 2007, Ashish and his team launched BigTree’s most successful brand yet, BookMyShow. Ashish strove to make the brand a quick success, taking the market by storm, bringing the cinema biggies like PVR, INOX and Cinepolis onto the portal.

Ashish didn’t limit BookMyShow to cinema ticketing and soon built diversified business offerings in the sports and music space. This allowed many big brands like IPL, ISL, F1, Sunburn and Supersonic to use the BookMyShow portal for ticketing their events.

Ashish’s strong passion and belief in his business model for BookMyShow, saw him bring on board investors Network 18, Accel Partners and SAIF Partners, who’ve together put in Rs. 300 crore in venture capital at a valuation of Rs. 1000 Crores.

Ashish was quick to see that consumers in India favour the mobile over the PC and launched the BookMyShow mobile app getting the early mover advantage. By 2015, with more than 12 million downloads, the app accounts for more than 60% of the overall transactions making it one of the most successful apps in India.

Sean Hanly, CEO, Ticketsolve (Ireland)

Ticketsolve was born when a not-for-profit festival in Dublin asked them to help out with a ticketing system. Not ones to turn down a challenge they threw ourselves in at the deep end. They soon realised that they could build Grade A software to facilitate ticketing, both online and at the box office. At the same time as avoiding crippling service or license fees.

Sean is Ticketsolve‘s CEO and is critical in the development and vision of Ticketsolve innovations. Sean worked previously as an Agile software consultant, and for several other IT consulting firms.

“Sean displays unwavering leadership and vision; pushing the Ticketsolve platform to keep evolving to the next stage, and really listening to customers to ensure Ticketsolve is future proofed, delighting customers constantly.

“It is a hard job, but he does it uncomplainingly, setting truly high standards for himself, the team, and the platform.”

Luuc Elzinga CEO & Co-founder, Tiqets.com (The Netherlands)

Luuc Elzinga has founded multiple start-ups, starting his career as an entrepreneur in 1997, and is currently the CEO of Tiqets.com.

Tiqets was the fastest growing start-up in The Netherlands twice in a row and delights its customers by improving one of the worst experiences of traveling: waiting in line for tourist attractions. With Tiqets, consumers can find, book, and use tickets for museums, shows, and attractions on their smartphones.

He is a author of the book The Art of Acquisition of New Clients. Luuc Elzinga commits new business partnerships and trains and coaches companies to be more effective in their sales efforts.

On the announcement of Tiqets as winner of the Dutch Tech5 Award, Luuca commented:”I’m so proud of what our amazing team has accomplished in the last year. Our revenue grew exponentially, but most importantly we helped bring more people into the best cultural venues worldwide.”

Travis Janovich, CEO, Etix (USA)

Travis founded Etix in 2000 based on the belief that venues could and should control their own destiny. Travis is a founder and developer of technology and telecommunications service enterprises and graduated with degrees in economics and statistics from North Carolina State University. An active supporter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, the organisation named Travis 2010 Man of the Year for raising more than $100,000.

In July 2017 Etix paid $16.5m for the acquisition of ExtremeTix, and in October 2017, Etix further expanded its portfolio through the acquisition of TicketBiscuit.

Etix followed up its purchase of ExtremeTix and TicketBiscuit with the acquisition of software developer Interactive Ticketing in December 2017. Interactive Ticketing CEO and president David Arevalo told IQ Mag: “We’re excited to end the year with Travis and Paxton and their great team… The ticketing industry has changed a lot since 1999 and Etix has been leading the way, continuously adding and updating features.”

TheTicketingBusiness Awards 2018 winners will be announced on 17 April at Emirates Old Trafford, Manchester, and are set to be the highlight of TheTicketingBusiness Forum 2018 – Europe’s biggest B2B ticketing meeting.

Tickets for the Forum are still available. Take a look at who is attending here.

Any questions about the Awards, please email awards@theticketingbusiness.com