I was presented with a conundrum today that I hadn't heard before, but I am assured comes up on a semi-regular basis.
A GA facility has a section set aside for Standby sales. I had to get clarification about what they meant by this. The organization knows that some people will not show up, even if they've purchased a ticket. So they oversell the performance (cue all those horror stories from overbooked flights). The issue is that those seats are included in all capacity calculations in Tessitura. The org would like them to be excluded from that number across the board (which would at some point potentially lead to a season overview screen showing Capacity: 105%).
We can certainly do some custom reports to exclude these seats in the calculations. But that seems like a hairy road to go down. Is there a way to set up the seatmap to indicate to Tessitura that the seat should not be included in capacity. We could kill the seats, but then they can't be sold.
Oh wise Tess sages, your wisdom is needed.
For the standard reports, the only way to take a seat out of capacity is with a blackout hold code, unfortunately. So I think custom reports are going to be your only option.
Actually I just had an idea. You could try putting the standby seats in a different zone, and then setting the base price on that zone to $0. Then either make the price editable or just us a different price type for standby seats when you sell them. I’m pretty sure that if the base price on a seat is zero, it’s effectively as if the seat doesn’t exist when it comes to the revenue capacity calculations, because 1 seat sold at $0 is $0. Any seat count capacity calculations would still count the seats, but I think all of the standard reports just do revenue capacity calculations anyway.
Kevin Sheehan
Senior Technical Writer & Consultant
Tessitura Network
+1 888 643 5778 x 329
ksheehan@tessituranetwork.com
We've got a similar set-up. I don't have a great new solution, but I did start using a shortcut in my custom reports. I created a system table that I call ltr_smap_venue which holds the smap_no in one column and the screen_no in a second column and which I populated with only the combinations that I would consistently want to include in reports. Then on all my reports I join to that table from t_seat. That way I don't have to remember the different zones every time I write something new - I can just use the same line of code over and over.
Anyway, have fun with all those overbooked shows! :)