Hey,
We have some performances that we want to exclusively eTicket/PAH. If you have those events in your order, you must receive them as PAH.
But, we have many other performances whereby they must be hard tickets. We're on TNEW so can use the LTR_DYN_SHIPPING_METHOD but the way TNEW behaves is that if there are contradictory entries in the table, ALL shipping methods become available to the web user. From the documentation:
Warning: If multiple items in the cart have contradictory entries in the table, all shipping methods available to the Web User will be used. For example, the cart contains Performance A and Performance B. Performance A has one entry in the table for PAHT and Performance B has one entry in the table for HABO. The Web User has access to the PAHT, HABO and Postal Mail shipping methods. Therefore, all three of these shipping methods will be presented to the user because the cart contains this conflict.
I understand PAH is an 'all or nothing' affair, so if we force orders into the PAH method but it is a mixed order, the PAH service attempts to print all tickets and then errors out when it doesn't find a PAH PDF design for the events that are not PAH compatible. Ideally it would only print the PAH tickets but skip over the others, keeping them SPD and allowing us to print them in a batch later.
Has anyone experienced anything similar and found a solution?
Cheers,
David Geoffrey Hall
Hi David,
We have a similar situation in that we want people to register for some free events on here and that for these events no tickets are issued. As we can't switch off email confirmations for just the free events currently their email confirmation is saying box office collect and always causes confusion on the day. We tried to set it up a new shipping method "No tickets issued" using LTR_DYN_SHIPPING_METHOD however we run into trouble when customers do a ticket purchase of other events at the same time due to the conflicting messaging. We can't take the chance that customers think they don't need to receive tickets for paid events so we haven't proceeded with enabling the "No tickets issued" delivery method. I would indeed be very interested to know if you find a solution for your problem as it would no doubt help with ours!
Vanessa
Must admit I haven't had to do this but was wondering if you could use the Performance/MOS setup to set the Physical Ticket performance so that they are unable to print on your web MOS to see if that would prevent the PAHT service printing them.
If it does, then you should then be able to change the delivery method on those orders and change the MOS to allow printing of the physical tickets.
Its clunky and inelegant but may be worth testing to see if it would work as an option.
Mark
Hi Mark,
This is actually how we have it working at the moment. Printing is enabled for the Web MOS only on the PAH-only events, so only those tickets are issued and the other tickets in the order are marked as SPD. We then turn off the print at home service once a week, activate printing on all other events for the Web MOS, and then do a batch print.
It's clunky, but it works...
dgh
Hi, David -
One other option to this is to use different ticket designs for the PAH vs. hard ticket performances/price types (even if those designs are replicas of each other). In the paht config file, there's a section called 'designs to skip' - which, when ticket design IDs are added here, the PAH service skips other those, leaving the PAH ticket printed and the others as SPD. The good thing about doing it this way is that you wouldn't have to constantly turn things on and off to print tickets - the config file does the work for you.
A little late to the party but thought I'd throw in my 2 cents!
Christy Carlson
Tessitura Network
Hi Christy, thanks for this suggestion
We've tried it out and unfortunately whilst the PAH Service doesn't error out when it can't find designs without PDFs, the service is marking ALL tickets in the order as TPD - not just the ones it has generated a PDF ticket for. Weird!
I have a ticket open with Tessitura about it as this does seem odd.