BookMyShow inks five-year partnership with PVR

Mumbai-based Bigtree Entertainment Pvt Ltd, which runs ticketing portal BookMyShow.com has signed a five-year deal to be the online ticketing partner for PVR Cinemas across India.

BookMyShow has already been collaborating almost all leading cinemas in India such as Reliance's Big Cinemas, DT Cinemas, Wave Cinemas, Cinemax, Fun Cinemas, INOX, M2K, Spice Cinemas, Satyam Cineplexes and SRS Cinemas. With this deal, both the players are targeting ticket sales worth Rs 1,000 crore over the five-year period. Post the deal, BookMyShow will market and sell tickets of PVR Cinemas, over its web, mobile apps and other affiliate channels.

"The partnership extends to areas outside just pure sales and to harness BookMyShow's analytical ability to ensure targeting the right content to right users as well as marketing initiatives around non-movies and alternative content," said Ashish Hemrajani, founder and CEO, BookMyShow.com.

"We have been in discussions with BMS for quite some time to work out this association. Besides a better reach, our association with BMS shall help us in CRM initiatives by deploying tools like KYC (know your customer) to help us serve our customers with their preferred choice of seats, concessions and other soft offerings," said Pramod Arora, group president and CEO, PVR Cinemas.

BookMyShow.com claims to be the largest entertainment ticketing portal in India with over 90 per cent of the market share in the online entertainment ticketing space. In addition to offering ticketing for over 1,500 screens across 350 cinemas in more than 100 cities, it sells tickets for over 1,000 events every year across India. Apart from these, it offers ticketing for sporting events such as Formula 1, Indian Premier League, Indian Cricket League, Aircel Chennai Open, Super Fight League and Yonex Badminton Championships.

The company has over 60 million average page views a month, an active database of over five million members, and claims to sell more than two million tickets per month. It also offers mobile applications for BlackBerry, iPhone, Android and Windows phone platforms. Headquartered in Mumbai, the company also has offices in New Zealand, Malaysia, Australia and the UK.

In August last year, venture capital firm Accel Partners invested Rs 100 crore (over $18 million) to buy a large minority stake in BookMyShow, through a mix of primary share issue and sale of shares by existing investor Network18 Media & Investments.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)