Hey Tess hive mind,
We have hit a point where we need to limit student ticket purchases per event. Which way is best to do this--via allocations or zones? Or maybe some crazy pricing rule? Or some other awesome way I haven't thought of?
In a nutshell, we want to allocate about 15-20 discounted tickets for students per show, but we don't want to keep them from being sold to full-price patrons if the need arises.
Any suggestions would be awesome!
Thanks
Carrie (from The Groundlings)
Hi Carrie,
A creative approach that takes some effort and maintenance is to create a separate “dummy” student section in your facility. This works nicely if you don’t want to seat the students at the time of order, but use them to strategically fill your hall where needed right before curtain. You obviously want to make sure you don’t oversell your hall, so you would need to monitor the number of real seats available vs the number of “dummy” student section seats sold. If your inventory is running low, you can always disable the student price zone or apply holds to control the student availability.
If you want to seat the students at the time of order, allocations or price zones are both viable options. You could easily apply a new allocation map or change price zones through season maintenance if you wanted those seats back for the general public.
Those are a few of my suggestions!
Best,
Nick
Thanks! Definitely a clever solution. Our theatre is general seating, though, so we're not too worried about seating anyone pre-show. We're really more worried about limiting the seats available to students online. We have a robust school and could easily fill the theatre with half-price tickets, so we need to find a way to cap it.
I figured capping it with allocations or zones would work (or a clever pricing rule), since they use promo codes to switch the price type, but I'm worried that we'll have occasional shows that don't fill student-allocated seats to capacity, inadvertently limiting what's available to the regular ticket buyers. Not sure if there's any way around that except to keep an eye on sales and release student-allocated tickets manually as needed.
Since you're already using promo codes to switch the price type, I would actually go with allocations and a MoS shift. It sounds like that would be the easiest solution for your setup.
A pricing rule could work well for you if you have your students identified in Tessitura (and they actually have/remember to use their correct web login!). You could then restrict the rule to the students on a list, and limit the maximum seats sold using that student price rule. You would need to set up a separate rule for each of your events to enforce the limits. While you can restrict the number of discount seats purchased per order, you would still risk a student logging back in and completing another order with the rule applied if the max seats limit still hadn't been reached. However, here's a good thread on the forum about creating an exclusion list to help manage this.
This would definitley take some more time and effort for the initial setup (vs. just applying allocations), but once it's in place you wouldn't need to worry about manually releasing seats to the general public. Of course this also means you wouldn't be holding tickets for students, and the general public could potentially buy all the seats to a show.
I like the idea of a pricing rule, but we have some added layers of complexity to our school setup in Tess that I'm not totally sure how to circumvent properly...
We use Constituencies to trigger MOS changes for every student level as they sign in (which expires after one year). This locks/unlocks the classes they're eligible for. BUT the eligibility for half price tickets is only during the time they actually take class (which expires after 6-12 weeks). We've used promo codes to discount the tickets thus far, but we haven't figured out how to limit the codes being used within an single event, since promos have such limited functionality.
I'm starting to wonder if we need to completely re-think our student ticketing--it's making my brain want to jump ship!