Coat check tickets: formats, prices and where to buy them

You are preparing a club night, a concert or an event, and you need coat check tickets. Good news: they are one of the cheapest supplies of your whole operation. Less good news: they are also the one that generates the most disputes per square centimetre. This guide covers the formats, typical prices, where to buy, what to look for, and then the maths few operators do: what paper tickets really cost once the night starts.

The three ticket formats

• •Numbered rolls: 1,000 tickets per roll (around 55 x 30 mm), continuous numbering. The cheapest format, originally designed for drink stands and raffles. A coat check needs two coupons per number, so you want double-coupon rolls, or two rolls with identical numbering.
• •Stub books: the coat check standard. Books of 50 tear-off tickets with 2 to 3 coupons per number: one for the hanger, one for the guest, and sometimes a third for accessories (bag, helmet, umbrella). The stub stays in the book and doubles as a log.
• •Custom printing: tickets in your colours, with your logo, numbering and wording. More expensive and with lead times, but useful for venues that care about image or want to make counterfeiting a generic store-bought ticket harder.

Typical prices, and where to buy

• •Numbered rolls: roughly 25 euros for 5,000 tickets (packs of 5 rolls of 1,000) from event stationery suppliers, both online and in office supply stores.
• •Numbered stub books: slightly more per ticket, sold in packs of 10 or 20 books.
• •Custom tickets: on quote depending on quantity and finish, from online printers.
• •For one-off events, rental is an option: several event suppliers rent complete bundles of racks, hangers and tickets by the night.

Order of magnitude for a busy club: a few dozen euros of paper per season. Let's say it plainly: the ticket itself costs almost nothing. Everything around it is what costs.

How to choose: the criteria that actually matter

• •Number of coupons: two minimum for a coat check (hanger + guest), three if you take bags and helmets. Single-coupon rolls condemn you to improvisation.
• •Continuous numbering with no duplicates: two open books covering the same number ranges is a dispute recipe. Log the range used each night.
• •Readability: big, high-contrast digits you can read in the half-light of a coat check counter. Elegant thin numbering gets expensive at 3am.
• •Colour: switching ticket colour from one night to the next is the simplest defence against last week's ticket showing up at the counter.
• •Stock: order for the season, not for the night. Running out of tickets on a Saturday cannot be fixed.

The real cost of paper tickets

Take a club open two nights a week with 250 deposits per night: about 25,000 tickets a year, barely more than 100 euros of paper. Negligible. The real cost lives elsewhere, measured in disputes, time and missing data.

• •The lost ticket: every guest who misplaces a coupon triggers a procedure (ID, description, waiting until end of service) and, legally, puts your liability as depositary on the line. We detail the mechanics in our coat check management guide.
• •Search time: a torn coupon, an unreadable number, a misplaced hanger, and the closing queue grows.
• •Invisible revenue: how many deposits tonight? What ratio versus entries? Without manual counting, a paper coat check produces no data at all.
• •The perpetual repurchase: cheap, but eternal. Every season starts from zero, with the same books, the same possible duplicates and the same disputes.

When is it time to go paperless?

Honestly: for a school fair, an annual gala or a one-off event, paper books do the job perfectly. The question arises when the coat check becomes a weekly operation. At that point, a digital cloakroom removes the consumable and its flaws in one move: guests scan a QR code on arrival and receive their ticket on their phone; at pickup they show the number on their screen and staff grab the matching hanger. Nothing to print, nothing to lose.

A ticket on a phone does not get lost: staff can find any deposit by name or phone number. Payment is contactless at drop-off, revenue and deposit counts are tracked in real time, and unclaimed items get an SMS reminder. To compare both worlds properly, our article on digitalizing the cloakroom walks through it step by step.

Conclusion

If you came looking for coat check tickets, you now know what to order: 2 or 3 coupon stub books for a classic coat check, double rolls for high volume, custom printing if image matters. And if your coat check runs every week, do the full maths at least once: paper is the only visible cost line, and rarely the biggest one.