India's largest badminton tournament. Free for 10 years. A revenue engine in two seasons.
The Yonex-Sunrise India Open, a BWF Super 750 event run by the Badminton Association of India, had offered free entry for over a decade. Ticmint partnered with BAI to change that. Season 1 (2025): 9,305 tickets issued, fans reached across 95+ countries. Season 2 (2026): 13,062 tickets, 500K+ new users, 138 countries, +27% revenue growth.
The numbers after two seasons.
For over a decade, India's biggest badminton tournament asked fans for nothing. And got exactly that in return.
The Yonex-Sunrise India Open is a BWF Super 750 event, top 20 players, fans from 100+ countries, Asia's biggest badminton stage. For more than ten years, every seat was free.
- No ticketing revenue: a global sporting property with zero commercial infrastructure.
- No fan records: no attendee data, no remarketing, no audience ownership.
- No way to scale: event impact had never been measured, let alone grown.
BAI needed a partner to architect the full transition: free entry to paid, unknown crowds to owned fan data, one-off event to repeatable revenue engine.
One platform. Built around the tournament.
Not a set of features. A purpose-built system for 23,000 attendees, 138 countries, and zero room for error.
Free for 10 years. Revenue-generating in two seasons.
The first question was simple: will fans pay? They did.
BAI launched the first-ever paid ticketing for the India Open. Structured tiers. Early-bird phases. Digital-first checkout. Fans across 95+ countries bought tickets. The question was answered.
10,000+ tickets · 95+ countriesBuilt for scale. Revenue grew +27%. 138 countries.
With proof in hand, Season 2 was built for scale. Wider pricing architecture, higher value tiers, performance marketing with full attribution. Average ticket value grew +22%. 500K+ new users acquired.
13,000+ tickets · 138 countries · +27% revenue- ₹0Pre-2025
- Season 1Fans prove they pay
- Season 2+27% revenue scale
- EngineRepeatable model
A badminton tournament in New Delhi. Fans in 138 countries.
India Open 2026 wasn't just an India story. Fans from 138 countries purchased tickets, up from 95+ in Season 1. 500K+ new users were acquired across the two seasons. 7M+ organic social impressions reached a global badminton audience that didn't previously have a direct relationship with BAI.
With Ticmint, every one of those fans became a data point BAI owns. Not a number in a marketplace dashboard. A contact, a remarketing audience, a foundation for next season's campaign.
One tournament. A blueprint for an entire sport.
The India Open proved something bigger than a single ticketing case study. It showed that Indian sports properties, even those with decade-long free-entry cultures, can be structured into scalable, data-driven revenue engines.
India's sports economy is growing at 14% CAGR, from $52B in 2024 toward $130B by 2030. Badminton alone is a $103.5M market growing at 9.8% CAGR. The model is replicable, for any federation, any sport, any government-backed sporting event ready to own its audience instead of giving it away.
Ticmint professionalizes sports ticketing with scalable digital infrastructure
"I'd recommend Ticmint to any large-scale sports federation or event organizer who is still struggling with manual gate management or opaque sales data. If you are looking to professionalize your commercial operations and want a partner that understands the high-pressure environment of live sports, they are an excellent choice for scaling digital infrastructure."
What I did
The Yonex-Sunrise India Open is a BWF Super 750 tournament run by the Badminton Association of India, and every seat had been free for over ten years. Ticmint partnered with BAI to move it to paid ticketing in two structured seasons. I ran the marketing, with a design-first approach to the campaigns.
Sources: Ticmint case study: ticmint.com/case-studies/india-open; Ticmint context file