Festicket Ltd.

Festicket Ltd., one of the world’s largest ticketing providers to event organisers, entered administration on 12 September 2022. The company sold tickets to some of the most well-known festivals in the world including Coachella and Tomorrowland. It achieved a turnover as high as £12m in 2019, but the company was never profitable. The pandemic hit the business hard, with an unprecedented level of ticket refunds and deferment requests due to event cancellations and reduced consumer confidence. The company raised a small amount of additional capital in 2021 to cover losses but ultimately decided to initiate a marketing process in 2022 seeking further investment or a sale of the company’s shares.

During this period, creditor pressure was growing. The company received a freezing order, followed by a ex-parte court application from a festival promoter on 16 August 2022, which impacted the company’s freedom to operate.

A decision was made to place the company into a moratorium on 17 August, 2022 to provide protection from further creditor action while the directors progressed towards a sale of the company. Ben Woodthorpe and Christopher Farrington of ReSolve were appointed as monitors.

While under creditor protection, it became apparent that the required timelines to complete a share sale were too tight for a potential purchaser to be comfortable with and it was decided that a pre-pack sale through an administration would be the most appropriate course of action.

A separate team from ReSolve (Cameron Gunn, Simon Jagger and Lee Manning) were appointed Joint Administrators on 12 September 2022. A sale of the business to Lyte, Inc., another ticketing platform, was completed on 13 September.

Unsecured creditors, whose claims to date total approximately £22.6m, are expected to receive a recovery of between 10-30%. Complicating matters though will be claims from many promotor creditors who assert that the terms of their contracts with the company required that their net funds were to be segregated and held in trust.

Solicitors from Greenberg Traurig are assisting the Joint Administrators.

Hilco Valuations Ltd. were engaged as valuation agents in relation to the company’s assets and sale.

The Joint Administrators’ Proposals can be found HERE.