For more than a decade, Gametime has helped fans quickly and easily snag last-minute tickets to sporting events, concerts, comedy shows, theatre performances and other live experiences through its mobile-first app.

The San Francisco company was founded in 2012 by Brad Griffith, a Giants fan who nearly missed his team clinch the National League pennant because he was scrambling to print tickets at the last minute. It uses a proprietary algorithm to compile supplier data on venue location and pricing for unsold tickets, helping users quickly find and use last-minute tickets to local events at reduced prices.

From its inspired origins offering tickets for select San Francisco venues, Gametime has made it to the big leagues: offering tickets to games and matches in over 60 cities across the U.S. and Canada, as well as music, comedy and more. All easy to purchase without hidden fees or surprises, in a mission to help its users create impromptu experiences at a moment’s notice.

The Challenge

Highly Relevant Search without Expanding the Roster

Given Gametime’s bias for spur-of-the-moment experiences, its app depends on real-time inventory, fast-changing availability and smoothly surfacing events for customers who often log on without a specific plan. With such high-volume, minute-to-minute inventory changes, search needs to be fast, reliable and low-maintenance.

The company needed a robust but simple-to-manage search solution, and its existing Elasticsearch platform demanded too much maintenance. Without a dedicated search team, generalist engineers were being pulled into search-related tasks impacting their ability to focus on innovation and improvements.

“We wanted something we could get up and running and not have to worry about,” says Turk. Maintaining its existing search platform required specialized knowledge and developing search features in-house would require additional resources — a costly expense Gametime sought to avoid.

It was with that in mind, the product team investigated new search solutions that could simplify search on the backend, while delivering the rich, keenly relevant search experience Gametime needs. Its search for a new workload-lifting solution ultimately brought the team to Algolia.

The Solution

A Search Partner that Lifts the Team and Conversions

For the team to move ahead, it needed to ensure its new Algolia search solution would not only cut maintenance but move the needle on ticket sales. 

To validate whether the search solution could provide the flexibility and ease it needed while maintaining strong performance, the company engaged in a pre-annual buy (PAB) with Algolia before committing to a full-year contract. Thanks in part to close collaboration with the Algolia success team and engineers, Gametime was able to hit its conversion target of 2 percent lift during the trial period and put in place a set-and-forget search infrastructure.

“Algolia alleviates a lot of work that we’d have to do manually, and configuring search that otherwise would require a lot of maintenance or the hiring of an engineer,” Turk says. “Algolia is more flexible and user-friendly than what we had in place.”

The strong collaboration between Gametime and Algolia has continued since the company moved into a full-year contract, with monthly team meetings to review and optimize search performance.

The Results

Reliable Search and Operational Savings for the Win

Gametime now has a search solution in place that’s ready to perform on game day without the need to hire expensive talent. Search has gone from a constant maintenance burden to a reliable, fast, scalable part of the company’s tech stack. 

Search is now a predictable, low maintenance, intrinsic part of the tech stack that performs reliably during peak demand. After meeting its conversion targets, Gametime continues to refine search performance and selectively evaluate advanced capabilities as part of its evolving discovery strategy.

“Algolia brought us the solid performance and low-maintenance optimization we need to consistently deliver great value to our customers,” Turk says. “But the show goes on! Every day we’re looking at new ways to improve our platform and the customer experience, and we’re continuously looking at how Aloglia’s AI solutions can help us achieve that.”