Hello All,
So with this here, I am more asking a question/looking for a conversation rather than trying to solve today's particular issue. I am not expecting immediate action of any kind. But I have seen a number of threads created recently about PAH and Mobile Tickets, and there are always fun issues with reprints, separating some tickets from the rest of the order, etc... which got me talking about delivering tickets in general, spurred a couple of conversations with coworkers thinking on the myriad number of issues I and my organization have had as well, and how things have changed.
In the days of yesteryear, a patron would call, the tickets would be mailed or held at the Will Call, and everyone was happy. Then online ordering came, and we had PAH enter into the equation. But still, pretty easy, we just now had a third option for orders. Something to split the gap between months-early subscription orders and people who purchased the week of who are still too eager to wait to pick them up at the Box Office the night of the performance. But even there, there was a general understanding with in person orders. You come to the Box Office, you purchase, they print them out and hand them to you, and you go in.
But then along comes mobile, and that is changing the game. Even in person orders at the Box Office might want to be mobile tickets these days. Especially when it is a Monday afternoon at 2:00 PM and not a Friday night at 7:45 PM right before the show purchase. And Covid certainly ruffled some feathers with its lessons on increased disease and germ prevention. It seems to me that things that used to be hard and true about orders and delivery methods are no longer so. Specifically, I am thinking about Mode Of Sale (MOS) and the Order Level specificity. MOS is used to determine Web vs. Phone vs. In-Person vs. Quick-Sale. But, as the same delivery methods are mainly being used for all of those anyway (except maybe Mail), tying the delivery methods to that seems unnecessary. And then the Order Level can also cause issues. To our practice, these days, the driving force behind how a ticket can be delivered seems to be at the Performance level. Some performances have VIP things that are supposed to be delivered one way, or student tickets that require proof of ID. Maybe an artist has a mobile-ticket only requirement. And then this is printing and reprinting. PAH and Mobile are order level printing (I believe, we are just getting started there; online TNEW might allow individual performance printing). But we are also well at the point where a quick, at the window, nigh of sale patron might want that ticket delivered to their phone rather getting something printed physically.
Anyway, my sort of vision would be to make a change kind of like what was done with source codes. It used to be just an order level source. Now they are specified at the line item level. What if we assigned delivery methods to performances, and then did something like source codes for orders? Maybe MOSes would have no defaults, and then you could reserve all the tickets, choose a delivery method at the end, and it would auto-fill on each line item. Except for those performances for which it was not valid; you would choose another delivery method. Or, you choose the delivery method first, then reserve all the line items, and it autofills in based on the one selected. And maybe you WOULD still have a default delivery method for MOSes like Walk-Up, figuring that most still WOULD get the printed ticket, but sometimes they go for mobile for future events. But to be more easily able to indicate that THESE tickets should go out this way and these OTHER tickets should go out this other way, even within the same order, would be nice.
Maybe you are all there ahead of me. Or maybe I am the lonely guy in a vacuum, and you all think I am a strange man for thinking this. Anyway, as the youtubers would say, let me know in the comments.
John A. Moskal II
All Delivery Methods are Order-based, and that is a fundamental problem with Tessitura that needs to be fixed. When it comes to Mobile Tickets accessed through TNEW, then you are basically accessing the ticket on a line item basis, and (somewhat confusingly to people familiar with how Tessitura works) the selected Delivery Method for the Order isn't important. You could select Will Call and still bring up your Mobile Tickets in TNEW. We have been doing that with PAHT, but that seems to have caused problems on occasion, and it's actually advised against.
This brings up a separate matter, which is that Mobile Ticket Delivery was rushed, presumably due to COVID, and is really not ready for use. Officially it is only recommended for use through TNEW: i.e. you're not even supposed to sell Mobile Tickets through the client. We sold one show with Mobile Tickets, thinking we'd sorted out the issues of selling them in the client, and it wound up being such a problem that we went back to PAHT across the board. One of the main sticking points was the way the Mobile Tickets are delivered via email. PAHT isn't brilliant, but Mobile Tickets email delivery fails on basically anything beyond a two-tickets-one-performance order.
We're juggling more Delivery Methods than that. We have streaming events (no tickets required of course), parking (which is handled via a kind of Will Call, but most parking purchases are part of large package sales, and we certainly don't want those forced into Will Call), school events where "ticketing" is managed on a class-by-class basis, etc. For the time being we've mostly eliminated physically printed tickets (Mail/Will Call), but those will be back in due time. Juggling all of these possibilities with the high likelihood of "mixed carts" has been extremely challenging.
The real solution is to allow LineItem by LineItem (at least! what of orders with specified recipients for SLIs?) delivery methods. That's obviously a big change, but hopefully being considered in the unified transaction entry project.
In the meantime I'm working on coming up with ticket types (and PAHT templates) for various scenarios like streaming and parking such that if they are part of a larger order they will get a "ticket" for these events, but the ticket will just be instructional text ("This is not a ticket!" followed by "Go to this url to stream your event", or "Please present photo ID to the parking attendant.", or "Go to the appropriate table for your school in the courtyard to pick up your packet." etc.). We have in the past let some of these go by just not having a PAHT template, but that clogs the error logs and massively exacerbated some other PAHT problems we were trying to troubleshoot last fall, beyond being confusing to patrons.
PAHT and Mobile Ticket delivery reprint by subline item please!! A++ . All my votes to this!! So happy we are not the only ones struggling. :-)
Fully agreed that delivery method by MOS causes tons of problems and needs to be fixed. We have a custom website and have had to implement custom coding to filter delivery methods by performance, but that still requires Tess configuration which causes conflicts elsewhere. Upping this request.
To add to this conversation, group leaders want to be able to do what they can do in Ticketmaster, which is transfer individual mobile tickets from a group order. So in addition to box office staff being able to send individual tickets to different email addresses, customers should be able to do that as well. (Not just group leaders - even someone who's meeting up with their friends and doesn't want to have to wait for them to arrive wants this functionality, and Tessitura is behind the curve on this.)