By Amanda A. Taylor-Uchoa

RIO GRANDE VALLEY, TEXAS – UTRGV Arts and Athletics departments are now utilizing a new ticket system, called Showpass.

In a trial run since September 2023, the new ticketing system eventually could become the primary vendor to sell tickets for UTRGV events in the future, pending a trial of about a year.

“We’re still in the process of testing it out,” said Juan Muñoz, program coordinator in the UTRGV School of Music, College of Fine Arts. “This is the fourth month we’ve been using it, so maybe in a year  or two we can look at how we can expand this system to the rest of the university.”

Showpass, established in Canada, is a ticketing platform and search engine for live, virtual, and streamed events. Its global distribution system uses Facebook, Google and other web publishers to help advertise events and sell tickets. So far at UTRGV, Showpass has been used to sell tickets for music and theatre events, and for basketball and volleyball games.

Smaller-scale events are perfect for testing out the new system so kinks can be worked out, and eventually could lead to selling tickets for much larger events.

Showpass also enables the ticket seller to be able to customize events with graphics and designs.

“It’s been great because we can now utilize our campus resources like graphic designers to help illustrate designs. So, visually, it’s more appealing than just text,” Muñoz said.

Another benefit to Showpass is that all events potentially can be housed within the same platform, he said, which would mean colleges and departments could be unified in a ticket-selling site.

“I think we’re stronger together,” he said. “We would just need to type in ‘UTRGV’ and all the events would pop up in the same place.”

Showpass currently is being used for the upcoming music season, spearheading this month with Alegría, UTRGV’s annual folklórico dance performance. Tickets are available here.