The ticket industry is rapidly advancing with more teams and venues adopting mobile ticketing methods that are in place mostly to prevent fraud. The NFL is now a big part of this movement, as they’ve just recently announced that ALL 32 teams will be adopting mobile ticketing heading into the 2018 season. If you’re looking to purchase tickets for games this season, TickPick has NFL tickets that are 10% cheaper than our largest competitor for the same seats because we don’t charge any service fees.
What does this announcement mean?
What it means is that if you plan on going to an NFL game this year, you’ll want to understand that the vast majority of tickets will need to be scanned off of a smartphone in order for fans to gain entry into the game. If you don’t have physical, hard stock tickets in your possession (that are only available to the small number of season ticket holders who still elect to receive a booklet of tickets rather than opt to receive mobile tickets), you will be required to go through the process of creating/logging into a team-specific TicketMaster platform to access your mobile tickets that will show as QR codes.
Those that may be used to printable PDF tickets that they’d bring out to the games to be scanned in the past should be aware that mobile QR codes are NOT valid for entry when they are scanned off of a printed piece of paper. This is much preferred to the converse, where in the past those who may have only brought their phones to the venue to be scanned were told that they needed to have printed tickets (with nary a printer in sight). There should be no more confusion; in 2018, you’ll have to have your smartphone with you to be admitted entry unless you have the hard stock tickets that are more and more scarce these days.
If you’re buying tickets on a secondary marketplace such as TickPick, you’ll want to understand that you’ll be receiving your mobile tickets from the seller through one or two methods a seller would have of delivering mobile QR tickets.
- The seller uploads a PDF as a screenshot of the QR code that they themselves have pulled up on their phone. This is nice because it avoids any hassle of having to set up an account with the team’s TicketMaster platform. You simply pull up the QR screenshot on your smartphone and have it scanned by the ticket taker at the venue.
- The seller transfers the tickets to you via the team’s platform. This will automatically forward a confirmation email to the email that the buyer used to purchase the tickets with that includes a link/button to accept the transfer offer. Clicking on this transfer invite will then automatically take you to the team’s TicketMaster platform (if you’re on a computer) or open up a mobile browser to that page on your smartphone to login to your account with that same email that they were sent to. Don’t already have an existing account with the team? Not a problem, you’ll simply be required to register for one and then you can claim these tickets.
To give you an idea of what a mobile ticket looks like, here is screen shot of one in the TickPick App (click to download) for a New York Mets game. Sometimes the barcodes are converted to a QR code, which is a square in shape.
Find out if your NFL team has mobile ticketing by selecting from the list below.
Arizona Cardinals