How to ticket a bush doof or regional festival

20 September 2026 · 6 min read · By eventflo

Ticketing a club night is mostly about the on-sale. Ticketing a doof or regional festival is mostly about everything after it. People who bought in March drop out in November. There's no signal at the gate. Half your crowd arrives in the same four hours with a car full of mates who each think someone else has the tickets.

Here's how to set it up so gate day is boring, in the good way.

Before you build a single ticket

Know your capacity, and make your ticket cap match it

Most regional events need some form of approval, and what's required varies a lot between councils and states. Talk to the local council early. Whatever capacity you're approved for, your ticketing should enforce it: total tickets on sale must never exceed your approved number. Crew, volunteers, artists and guests count towards the people on site too, so leave room for them.

Decide your policies now, not in a panic later

Write these down before you go on sale and put them in your ticket terms:

• Cancellation. Fire, flood and heat are real. What happens if you have to cancel or move?
• Refunds and transfers. Can people get a refund, sell their ticket or transfer it? (Strong tip: allow resale and transfers. It saves you hundreds of refund emails.)
• Age. 18+, or all ages with conditions?
• What's included. Camping? How many nights? Vehicles?

Get someone qualified to check your wording. Australian Consumer Law guarantees apply whatever your terms say.

Build your ticket types for the gate

A doof has more moving parts than "GA". Make each one its own ticket type so you can cap it, price it and count it:

Set a per-order limit. For a 1,500-person festival, nobody needs 30 tickets in one order. A cap of six to ten covers a car load of mates and makes bulk scalping harder.

Consider payment plans for bigger ticket prices. A $250 weekend ticket is easier to commit to in March if it's paid off over a couple of months.

Plan the gate for no signal

This is where regional events die. Assume zero reception at the gate and plan from there.

• Find out what your scanning setup does with no signal. Ask your ticketing platform exactly how scanning behaves when the gate has no reception, rather than assuming. Test it before gates open, on site, with a real ticket.
• Get tickets onto phones early. Tell punters to download their ticket at home. Don't rely on them loading it at the gate.
• Charge everything. Power banks for every scanner. The gate runs longer than you think.
• A fallback for no-phone punters. Phones die on a nine-hour drive. Have a way to find someone by name and check photo ID.
• Separate lanes. Vehicle passes and wristbands at one point, people at another. Crew and artists in their own lane.
• Selling on the gate? If you'll sell tickets on arrival, sort it out beforehand: how you take payment with no signal, and how those sales count against your cap.

Consider hard tickets for the gate

Some regional crowds and older punters still want something physical. Printed tickets with scannable codes can work alongside phone tickets, as long as your scanning treats them as the same inventory so nothing gets sold twice.

Keep the tickets moving after on-sale

With months between purchase and event, plans change. How you handle that decides how many angry messages you get.

• Turn on official resale. Someone who can't make it sells through your platform to someone who can. You don't process a refund, the buyer gets a real ticket, and it doesn't end up on a scalper site. More on that in how to stop scalpers reselling your tickets.
• Allow transfers, with a sensible limit. People reorganise car pools constantly.
• Run a waitlist once you sell out, so there's a queue of real buyers for any tickets that come back.

Talk to your crowd like they're coming out bush

Your buyer list is your safety channel. Plan at least these messages:

1. Six weeks out: what to bring, water, shade, dust, cold nights.
2. Two weeks out: getting there, directions, the last servo, fuel.
3. Three days out: gate times, what's allowed, "download your ticket now, there's no signal at the gate".
4. Day of: anything that's changed, like weather, road conditions or gate delays. SMS beats email here.

That third message saves your gate crew more grief than anything else on this list.

How eventflo handles it

Everything below is in eventflo now:

• A QR code per ticket, with duplicate-scan detection at the gate.
• Manual check-in by name for punters without a phone (your staff check ID).
• Separate ticket types and releases, with a per-order limit for each event.
• Hard tickets at the gate, scanned alongside digital ones.
• FloKiosk sales, so punters can buy at the door.
• Payment plans with deposits and instalments.
• FloMarket resale and ticket transfers, with per-ticket transfer limits.
• A waitlist for sold-out events.
• Email and SMS campaigns to your ticket buyers, currently in beta and available on request.
• A ticket widget you can embed on your own site, and promoter links to track who is selling for you.

eventflo's fee is 2% of the ticket price on each paid ticket, minimum $1, maximum $5, GST inclusive. You pay it out of the ticket price, buyers never see it, and free tickets carry no eventflo fee. You can add your own booking fee (per ticket) and/or transaction fee (per order) on top, each from A$0.10 to A$10.00. Buyers pay those and you keep 100% of both. Our arithmetic: a $50 ticket is 2% = $1.00. Your booking fee, if you add one, applies across all of it.

Running something out bush this summer? Tell us about the site and we'll help you set up the ticketing before the gate planning starts.