We are curious to hear from other sites that are ticketing a movie theater or film festival using Tessitura. What types of movie theater ticketing are you doing, how do you do the event set-up and how do you present this on the web?
Thanks
Gary Lustig
Ticket Philadelphia
Good morning Gary,
We at the Science Museum use Tessitura to sell tickets to our Omnitheater films. Generally we run 1-2 different movies at a time though right now we are in the midst of our annual Omnifest where we run 5-6 movies at a time.
Since the Omnitheater seating is general admission our venue is set up as a big box with the correct amount of seats. We also check the GA Indicator in facility set-up under Best Seat Maps and teach our cashiers to use the Best Seat button (or Alt-B if you're like me and love keyboard shortcuts) when selling. This is a lot quicker than going to the seat map and actually choosing seats when seat location doesn't matter.
As far as web sales you can see what we've done on our website at https://www.smm.org/tickets/buy/. We do utilize print at home tickets and scanners and it has really helped cut down on our will call which is especially nice because a lot of patrons will walk up for movies at the last minute and it can be a race to get them all in on time.
If you have any other specific questions about set-up or web sales let me know. We've been live for just over a year now and Tessitura works very well for us.
What does checking the GA Indicator do? I've looked on the documentation for Building a Facility and it doesn't specify what the use is for. We have numerous items that we sell in GA houses.
Someone from Tessitura can correct me if my terminology isn't right, but basically the indicator makes it so that, when Best Seating, Tessitura doesn't search the map to find what the Best Seat map things are the best seats; it simply takes the first seats it finds. So it basically makes using the Best Seat button faster. If it's a small house it's not really noticeable, but for our General Museum Exhibit facility which has several thousand seats in it we see a several second difference.
You can find all the details on the GA Indicator (and much more) in the brand new Facility Setup document:
http://www.tessituranetwork.com/~/media/Documentation/Ticketing/Facility_Setup.ashx
The GA Indicator box optimizes the best seating function for general admission houses. To speed up the function, contiguity (i.e. fill patterns), best seat group ranking, and special request options are not considered when the best seating function selects seats. The only values considered are number of seats, price zone (if specified), allocation (both MOS and constituent ranking allocation) and whether or not the seats in question have valid price maps assigned. The seats selected are not guaranteed to be next to each other on the map, although it is likely that they will be.