Greetings all,
Does anyone know of a way to change the sold out threshold for pricing zones in TNEW? I want to make it so that if there are less than 4 tickets available, that zone no longer displays and cannot take more reservations. I know you can change the limited availability threshold, but I can't find anything on the sold out threshold.
Thank you!
Hi Joshua,
Is your intention to keep the last four tickets for in-house sales? If so, you could do this with allocations. In this case, you would create an allocation code called something like "In House" and make the code available to whichever modes of sale you want, but excluding the web mode(s) of sale. Then you could apply the allocation codes to four seats in each zone. The drawback of this approach means that it would require you to select the specific seats to allocate for in-house use, instead of any four. But, it would strictly enforce the sale of those seats to certain modes of sale, and TNEW would hide the zone as you're expecting.
Thanks Michael,
Unfortunately, allocations won't work in this case because I am trying to be a bit more manipulative. We are getting ready to open an installation project which will have timed entry. To allow social distancing, we are trying to allow one "po" of up to 4 people every 15 minutes. So if 1 person books, I want the remaining seat to become unavailable so no one else can book that time slot. I think I will have to do 1 seat per slot and different price types for each number of attendees, but that takes away some pricing flexibility that I would have used price types for so I was hoping for a different solution. I appreciate the suggestion though.
Joshua,
We had something similar that we did a few years ago with golf registrations for a private golf course for which we briefly (do not ask; LONG story) became proprietors. Essentially, though, we were able to sell either a 7 AM tee time, a 1 PM tee time or an "all day" tee time for each day. Naturally, the purchase of the "all day" makes both the 7 and 1 null and void while the purchase of either 7 or 1 nullifies the all date.
What we did is to create a custom procedure which was triggered by the sale of such an item via TNEW which then added blackout hold codes to the relevant events, thus eliminating availability, and, since it was the event as a whole, it went as far as to take them off sale, too just for good measure.
If such a thing can be quantifiable into such a procedure for your pods, and you have someone with the skills to write it up, that could be a solution (though probably not the greatest solution ever).
Just thought I would throw it out there in case it helps and/or gives you another idea that might work. Best of luck!
John
I have a couple ideas that might help or get you thinking in the right direction (or down a dead end).
My guess is this set up would fail. I doubt that the price type change rule would fire, since the new price type isn’t allowed on the MOS (although worth a shot). You would also probably need to increase the ticket price and have the volume rule give a discount to the price result you want (I doubt you can give a $0 discount and have the rule fire). There is also an inherent issue with the Volume rule. It allows one to go over the volume threshold if it is hit within an order (you may want to double check that - going by memory).
If someone wants to pay way more for the ticket (one of the 4 remaining tickets) think of it as a donation. You could do something special for those. When you realize that only the $100 increased option is available on a performance, take it off of TNEW (WebPublish End date or online MOS end date). You could add wording to the Content explaining the when the price is $100 higher a threshold has been hit and it is effectively sold out.
If you are thinking of figuring out a SQL job that can take it off of TNEW, the inherent question is what does 4 left mean? Does that mean 4 seats with available status? What about seats with Locked status? Locked seats are in someone’s cart, but those can get deleted from the cart or the cart expires.
Your issue seems to get awful complicated very quickly. That is why I was hoping a pricing rule(s) would automate it for you. Maybe John’s idea would work?
Thank you all for recommendations! It seems there are no easy and perfect solutions (par for the course I suppose). For now, I am going to go back to the powers that be and explain the limitations and what a couple of options might be. I may recommend this to Tess as a potential improvement for the future. It would be amazing to be able to change how TNEW defines "sold out" in the UI. I can see a lot of scenarios where this would come in handy.