Running a hockey tournament means juggling ice time, officials, and rosters, and ticket sales often end up an afterthought until the week before puck drop. Selling tickets at the door works, but it means long lines, cash handling, and no real way to know how many people are actually coming.
Learning how to sell hockey tickets online fixes most of that before the tournament even starts. Families can buy ahead of time, you get a headcount to plan around, and checking in at the rink takes seconds instead of minutes.
This guide walks through how to set up online ticket sales for a hockey tournament, from choosing a platform to tracking sales as they come in.
Author’s note: Olivier shares tips and tricks he’s learned over the past decade as the owner of a kids’ sports program. Today, as co-founder of Activity Messenger, he helps hundreds of hockey tournaments, camps, and schools across North America simplify ticketing, registration, and communication.
The platform you pick determines how smooth the rest of this process goes, so it’s worth getting right before you start building anything.
Popular options for tournament ticketing include Activity Messenger, Eventbrite, Ticketleap, and Universe. If your tournament already uses a registration platform for teams and officials, check whether it also handles ticketing.
Keeping ticket sales in the same system as your roster and communication tools saves you from reconciling numbers across three different logins during tournament week.
👉 Looking for the best event ticketing software for tournaments? Here is a list of the best event ticketing platforms on the market.
Once you’ve picked a platform, build a dedicated page rather than relying on a generic event listing. Include:
If your tournament sells reserved seating rather than general admission, an interactive seating chart lets buyers pick their own seats and see pricing by section as they go, instead of emailing you to ask what’s left.
Also, make sure the page works well on a phone. Most people buying tournament tickets are doing so on their phones, often while making other weekend plans, not at a desktop.
The easier it is to pay, the fewer people abandon the page halfway through. Consider offering:
Families are used to having a payment option that matches whatever they already have set up on their phone. Cutting that option out over one or two fewer integrations isn’t worth the drop in completed purchases.
🏷️ Promo codes and early-bird pricing are worth setting up here too. They give you a way to track exactly which channel is driving sales.
A ticket that’s just a PDF attachment is easy to lose in an inbox by tournament day. Branded, mobile-friendly tickets solve that:
This step doesn’t take long to set up, but it’s the difference between a professional-feeling event and one that looks like it was thrown together the week before.
Online ticket sales work best when they’re part of a broader push, not a page you built once and linked to from one Facebook post. Strategies include:
QR codes are where online ticket sales pay off most visibly, right at the rink door.
That “walk-up” line doesn’t have to mean a separate cashbox. A point-of-sale option lets staff sell tickets directly at the door, credit card or cash, with those sales landing in the same system as everyone who bought online ahead of time.
You’ll get one accurate sales total instead of reconciling an online report against a handwritten door log after the tournament.
📌 Pro Tip: If you’re expecting a lot of walk-up sales, consider separating the check-in and ticket-purchase lines. This keeps people who already have tickets from waiting behind buyers who still need to purchase.
Leading up to the tournament, keep ticket holders in the loop without having to message everyone by hand. Automated reminders can cover:
Setting these up once, ahead of the tournament, means updates go out the moment something changes instead of whenever you get a chance to send them.
Before sending the link out to families, run through it yourself:
A few minutes of testing catches the kind of issue (a broken link, a missing field, a QR code that won’t scan) that’s far more time-consuming to fix once tickets are already in people’s inboxes.
Most ticketing platforms give you real-time sales data. Use it to:
The most reliable approach is a dedicated ticketing platform with a clear ticketing page, multiple payment options, and built-in QR code check-in, rather than piecing together a payment link and a separate check-in process.
Start by choosing a platform built for sporting events, build a dedicated ticketing page with pricing and dates, then connect it to your marketing channels so the link actually reaches people before the tournament.
A general platform can work, but sport-specific ticketing tools tend to handle things like team-based ticket categories, multi-day tournament passes, and QR check-in more smoothly than a generic event page built for concerts or conferences.
Costs vary depending on the platform and features you need. Compare transaction fees, monthly software costs, payment processing fees, and any charges for features such as reserved seating or mobile tickets.
Each ticket gets a unique QR code attached to the confirmation email. At the rink, a volunteer scans the ticket with a phone, which verifies it and checks the person in without needing a printed list.
Credit and debit cards cover most buyers, but adding Interac e-transfer for Canadian families and Apple Pay or Google Pay for mobile buyers reduces the number of people who abandon checkout.
Opening ticket sales four to six weeks before the tournament gives you time to run marketing and reminders without rushing, and it gives you an early read on attendance while there’s still time to adjust.
Yes, if your platform supports it. Tickets saved to a mobile wallet stay accessible from the phone’s lock screen, which cuts down on the “I can’t find my email” delay at the door.
Some platforms support an interactive seating chart, letting buyers pick their own seats and see pricing by section during checkout. This matters more for tournaments with assigned seating than for standing-room or general-admission events.
Yes, a promo code system lets you offer early-bird pricing or a discount for a specific group, like sponsors or returning families, and gives you a way to track which channel actually drove the sale.
Selling hockey tickets online does more than move transactions off a folding table at the rink door. It gives you a real headcount ahead of time, cuts down check-in lines, and frees up volunteers who’d otherwise be handling cash all weekend.
If you’re looking for a platform that handles ticketing alongside registration and communication, Activity Messenger covers ticket sales, automated reminders, and post-event surveys in one place.
🗓️ Book a demo with one of our experts to see how it works for your tournament.
