900,000 visitors. One connected showground.
How Australia's largest annual ticketed event ran visitor wallets, self-service top-ups, vendor payments, real-time settlement, and indoor wayfinding from one Ludo deployment.
- visitors through the gate
- 900k+
- visitor app accounts
- 250k+
- vendor payments processed
- 3M+
- operational uptime
- 99.99%
01 / The challenge
A showground is too large for disconnected tools.
The Easter Show has the pressure of a city-scale operation compressed into twelve days: families buying credits, ride operators scanning cards, vendors taking payments, support teams fixing edge cases, and venue teams watching the day unfold.
The hard part is not only taking payments. It is keeping every surface aligned while the crowd moves: the app, service counters, self-service kiosks, vendor terminals, settlement, refunds, maps, and reporting.
02 / The deployment
One operating layer across visitors, vendors, and venue teams.
- Visitor app, cards, wristbands, and kiosks shared one wallet layer.
- Vendor terminals applied revenue splits as transactions happened.
- Venue teams saw payments, top-ups, devices, vendors, and visitor activity in one dashboard.
Visitors could load value before they arrived, top up at staffed or self-service points, and spend across rides and vendors. Operators saw live totals instead of waiting for an after-event reconciliation cycle.
03 / Self-service
Top-ups moved out of the queue.
Public top-up stations gave visitors a clear place to update Fun Pass credit without interrupting support teams. The station at Grand Parade made the system visible without making it feel technical.
04 / Vendors
Payments stayed simple at the counter.
Clover Mini terminals gave vendors a familiar, fast surface for top-ups and transactions. Ludo handled the event wallet, access, and settlement logic behind the scenes, so seasonal staff did not need to learn a complicated new stack.
05 / Wayfinding
The visitor app became a live guide.
Venue maps lived inside the Easter Show visitor app, helping visitors find exhibitors, food, rides, amenities, and facilities across the showground. The interactive map was powered by Mappedin and surfaced inside the same app visitors used for show-day convenience.
Implementation partner
Almost 500k
map sessions
5+ years
of map minutes in two weeks
06 / Result
The show kept moving.
The outcome was not a flashier payment screen. It was operational calm: visitors had more ways to self-serve, vendors had clearer totals, and the venue had a live view across the moving parts.
“We needed to elevate our visitor experience, and we found a partner capable of delivering everything we envisioned on a digital platform.”
Shane McGrath
Head of Operations, Sydney Royal Easter Show
“If we do our job right, visitors barely notice the tech. They just have a better day.”
Bart Wildash
Founder & Product Lead @ Ludo
