Hello All,
We are starting to think of ways, as I am sure you all are as well, to do seating in a responsible, socially distant way. What I am wondering is if there might be a way to have the seat count drive how the best seating works. Some venues, including ours, have some odd set-ups, which means the "best option" for social distance seating might have to be more prescribed in advance rather than "block out 4 seats in every direction from all seats purchased".
What that means, though, is that there will also naturally develop areas of the hall where you can sell anywhere between 1 and 6 seats to the same party, and another area where you can sell only 1 or 2, and these might all be within the same pricing section. Is there a way then, to maybe creatively set things up based upon the seat count so that a 1 or 2 person reservation goes to the 1 or 2 area and leaves the 1 - 6 area for a larger party that might come later? As a presenting organization, we do a lot of negotiating with touring artists, and knowing a rough capacity is great, but not knowing whether these areas are going to be sold to groups of 1 or 6 can vastly affect the scales.
At this point in time, I am mainly thinking best seating; so no online SYOS/seating map, but if you have clever ideas for SYOS, certainly I would take that, too.
Thanks!
John
Hi John A. Moskal II and J. Paul FitzGerald,
We are considering what might need to be done with Tessitura and TNEW to assist with social distance seating and there are several conversations happening across the community about it.
The larger question at the moment is the financial feasibility of this for our members, and whether it is logistically feasible to handle other aspects of the event such as ingress/egress to the building and hall, bathroom and concession queues, and management of lobby space, to maintain social distancing throughout the experience.
So far, where members have done the financial analysis, we've mostly heard that it would not be financially feasible for members to do social distance seating for events. As a result we haven't been moving forward with features to support it.
Would doing social distance seating be financially feasible for you? We're actively listening to this conversation across the community to help us make decisions around this.
Chris Szalaj
Product Owner, Business Facing Products
Tessitura Network
Hi Chris!
Having a larger performance in our mainstage theatre isn't financially feasible for us, however, something we have been talking about is moving performances from our black box to our main theatre. We are essentially moving a show from a smaller venue into a larger venue with the expectation that we will get about the same number of seats or a little more in the bigger theatre. We also have outside presenters who are interested in using our larger venue for dance recitals or lectures.
I would personally love to see a functionality around social distancing seats. I've been manually trying to model what this would look like, but it has been difficult for me not knowing what size groups to expect for any given show (it would be much different for a recital than a comedy show). We want to maximize the number of people while still being responsible.