All 2,500 Fall Ball tickets made available Monday afternoon were sold out just over 12 hours later, according to Office for Campus Life (OCL) Assistant Director David McGraw.
Programming Board and OCL switched to online ticketing for this year's Fall Ball, the university's annual fall dance, which is being held tomorrow night in the Gantcher Center, after last year's ticket distribution process led to very long lines at the Mayer Campus Center's Information Booth, which were an inconvenience for students, according to Programming Board co-chair Leo Greenberg.
"It used to be in the past that for Fall Ball when tickets were on sale at [the information booth], lines would form that were all the way down the street and people had to spend hours waiting in line if they wanted a ticket, and it was just very inconvenient," Greenberg, a senior, said.
Programming Board will continue to use the same online ticketing system for other events in the future, including the fall concert, Winter Bash, Spring Fling and the four Senior Pub Nights that do not occur during Senior Week, according to Greenberg.
Tickets for Fall Ball were made available for free on TuftsTickets.com on Monday at noon and would have been available until Friday at noon or until they sold out, whichever came first. Attendees will be required to show a Tufts ID and a printed e-ticket to enter the dance.
McGraw said that because all students were able to get tickets online at the same time, the ticket distribution process was accelerated, though he cannot compare the rate to that of previous years.
"It's difficult to really estimate whether it was quicker or not since we took a totally different route on how we distributed tickets this year," McGraw said. "Due to students' requests the last few years to move the ticket sales online, obviously it's going to expedite the process by which students can get tickets because they no longer have to wait in line for two or three hours just to get one ticket, but multiple people can access the website at the same time."
McGraw was pleased with the ticket distribution process.
"We were very happy with this first run on it and we hope to continue its success throughout the rest of the year," he said.
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Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Programming Board will continue to use the same online ticketing system for the four Senior Pub Nights that occur during Senior Week. Programming Board will in fact use the online ticketing system for the four Senior Pub Nights that do not occur during Senior Week.
