It staged its first production (The Pirates of Penzance) in November 2009. After producing a small but informative website, the society decided to incorporate 21st century technology into the site and to use e- commerce to sell tickets to their production at the Star of the Sea Theatre. Management contracted Seat Advisor Australia, a box office software company based in Victoria, to install an e-commerce system into their website. Their main product SABO (Seat Advisor Box Office) is a box office software and venue management system, which offers the following benefits to event managers and marketers. The system: allows venues to keep their ticketing in-house is capable of handling 5000 to 10 million tickets per year is suitable for sports teams, theatres, cinemas, stadiums, event venues, theme parks, universities, horse racing, universities, casinos and more operates at a lower cost with no upfront costs offers a complete internet-based ticketing solution including box office, telephone and internet ticket sales, subscriptions, web presence and marketing offers a real-time unified inventory across all sales channels has colour-coded interactive SeatMaps with the ability for users to select the seat(s) of their choice with a click of the mouse allows customers to see their view from seat to centre stage/stadium when buying allows sophisticated database management includes patron preference tracking for marketing facilitates detailed sales and financial reporting. (Seat Advisor Australia 2009) The cost to the Manly Musical Society was a very small fee per ticket to SABO and a small credit card fee per booking. Compare this with the cost of maintaining a physical box office or a using a ticketing agency with the attendant problems of cost and managerial time, and consider the advantages to the consumer of no fee, seat selection and tickets delivered by email. It is clear that this system or a similar one will be used by event producers in the twenty-first century as the advantages to both event producer and consumer are marked. The Manly Musical Society has since moved to a larger theatre - the Glen Street - and now use their in- house box office facilities. Nevertheless, the process offered by SABO is well worth investigating for any event producer looking for an effective and efficient method of ticket distribution.5 Given that the Manly Musical Society [see event profile on page 293} does not wish to make enormous prots and their cast and musicians are not paid, what do you thinltwould be a fair price to payT for a ticket to one of their productions, that covers their costs and produces a surplus to fund their next production? Five shows including a matinee would be scheduled