Ticketing System and Member Portal

Overview

Cannon Hall Farm is one of the UK’s best-known family farm attractions — a working farm in Barnsley, South Yorkshire that’s pulled in hundreds of thousands of visitors a year and a national TV following along with them. Tickets, events, livestreams, memberships, VIP experiences, birthday parties: it’s a proper operation, and almost all of it runs on the till of an online booking system.

For years that ran on an off-the-shelf ticketing platform — a solid, well-known one used right across the industry. The trouble is, it was built for every attraction, which means it was built for none of them in particular. So we designed and built Cannon Hall Farm their own.

The custom ticketing system we built has since taken 219,000+ bookings, sold more than £10 million in tickets, and given over 200,000 people a “Passport” to the farm — their own account that remembers every visit. And it’s still growing: ticket revenue is up 12.9% year on year.

The challenge

There was nothing wrong with the platform they were on. It’s a perfectly good bit of software. But Cannon Hall Farm aren’t a perfectly standard attraction.

They run weather guarantees. Livestreamed events you pay to watch from your sofa. Sessions with two different start times on the same day. Bundled tickets where admission comes with a sheep-shearing demo or a meet-and-greet. Memberships, VIP experiences, accessibility bookings, parking add-ons, account credit, gift passes. An off-the-shelf platform can’t bend to all of that — so the farm was doing the bending instead, shaping how it ran the business around what the software would allow.

Every good idea ran into the same wall. Want to give visitors a free return pass when it rains on their day out? Sell tickets to a live online broadcast? Launch a membership? On a standard platform that’s either a clumsy workaround or a flat no. And on top of it, the most valuable thing of all — the relationship with the customer, and the data behind it — sat inside someone else’s system rather than the farm’s own.

They didn’t need a better off-the-shelf platform. They needed one of their own.

What we did

We designed and built Cannon Hall Farm a completely custom ticketing system from the ground up — and we’ve been developing it ever since. Two halves matter: the ticketing engine, and Passport, the customer layer that sits on top of it.

A ticketing system built around the farm — not the other way round

The core does everything you’d expect a great booking system to do, exactly the way the farm needs it: real-time capacity management, secure payment (Stripe and Klarna), barcoded tickets and redemption at the gate, discount codes, and bundled or variant tickets — standard admission, admission-plus-sheep-shearing, after-3:30 tickets, meet-and-greets, VIP experiences and birthday parties. Sessions can run at two different times on the same day. Wheelchair and mobility-scooter spaces can be booked properly rather than bolted on. Because we built it, when the farm needs something new, we add it — instead of waiting to see if a third party ever will.

Passport — a digital passport to the farm

Passport is the bit visitors actually live in. It’s their account and their pass to everything Cannon Hall Farm does: book and pay, keep every ticket in one place, share passes with the rest of the family, gift passes to someone else, carry account credit, and look back over past visits. One “Sign in with Passport” login works across the attraction, the food shop and the merch shop. More than 200,000 people now have one — and over 36,000 have used it to come back and book again.

A streaming platform of their own

Plenty of attractions sell the odd online event. Cannon Hall Farm runs a proper one — so we built them their own video platform, baked straight into Passport. It’s a library of live broadcasts and on-demand catch-up: customers buy a ticket, watch the event live, and then it stays in their account to watch again, filterable by year.

Lambing Night Shifts, the Online Country Show, Shire Horse Live, Rob and Dave on tour, an evening with Matt the Vet — they go out live to a paying audience, then become a back catalogue that keeps earning. It turns a one-night event into a lasting asset, and it lets the people who’ll never make it to Barnsley pay for a slice of the farm anyway.

Birthday parties, systemised

Booking a birthday party at a busy farm used to be death by admin: phone calls, emails, a spreadsheet somewhere, and a lot of back-and-forth to pin down a date, a package and a final headcount. So we took the whole thing apart and built it back into the system as a proper booking flow — one that runs through the customer’s Passport account.

Parents pick a date and a party package, pay, and then manage the booking — guest numbers, details, changes — from the same account they buy their day tickets in. The farm gets every party booked, paid and organised in one place instead of stitched together across inboxes. A genuine operational headache, turned into something the system just handles.

Since it launched in 2025, more than 250 birthday parties have been booked and run straight through Passport — and the pace is climbing, with 2026 already matching the whole of the previous year inside six months.

The clever bits an off-the-shelf platform simply can’t do

This is where building your own pays off:

• The Rainy Day Pass. If it rains over a set amount on the day of your visit, the system automatically issues you a free return pass — no forms, no arguing at the desk. A genuine weather guarantee, run entirely in software. On one wet day in May, it issued 416 passes and welcomed hundreds of those visitors back.
• Live paid broadcasts that reach beyond the gate. In a single month, online events like the Shire Horse Special and the Online Country Show sold over 2,100 tickets — to people who were never going to fit through the gate (all run on the video platform above). Pure new money.
• Play Pass memberships. A recurring membership that renews on its own, sold and managed entirely within the system.
• Parking, sorted at checkout. A simple paid-parking add-on that around 70% of bookings now take — revenue that used to be left at the gate.

Reporting the farm actually owns

Because the data lives in their system, the farm can finally see what’s really happening: revenue and visitor numbers, repeat-visit patterns, which customers are active, lapsing or gone, and how spend shifts across weekends, time of day and promotions. It’s the difference between renting your numbers and owning them.

Results

The custom system didn’t just match the old platform — it unlocked things the farm could never do before, and the numbers have followed.

• 200,000+ registered Passport users, up from under 40,000 three years ago.
• 219,000+ bookings taken through the system.
• More than £10 million in tickets sold to date.
• Ticket revenue up 12.9% year on year, on 4.6% more visitors — the farm earning more from every visit, helped by add-ons, bundles and live events the old platform couldn’t sell.
• Around 70% of bookings now add paid parking at checkout.

And it never stands still. Because it’s theirs, we keep shipping: new events, new ticket types, memberships, livestreams — whatever the farm dreams up next. The software has stopped being the thing that says no.