We are using price zones to offer 15 minute time slots for our Frank Lloyd Wright House. Everything is working wonderfully, but we are wondering if it's possible to make a price zone unavailable for sale after its time. So a 10:15 am ticket couldn't be sold to someone at 11 am.
Documentation on price zones makes it sound like that's the way it's designed to function, but ours isn't doing that. Any of our associates could go in at 5 pm and sell a ticket for any time earlier that day. As we have a limited capacity for each time slot, this has caused some difficulties with guests in the past.
Hi Brandi! (Again!)
I would be curious as to what documentation you are seeing on the price zones that says they would become unavailable after its time, because that sounds new to me.
On the other hand, one thing you could do is to build Price Events into each zone, to just disable them after the time has passed (say, for 5 minutes after each time). I believe you SHOULD be able to do that through season maintenance using relative dates to hopefully do a huge swath of them at once rather than having to build them all individually.
John
I'm telling you, you're my new best friend!
Here is the documentation I read. Number 7 kind of makes it sound like unless you follow the Note, it would do it automatically, but that could just be the way I'm reading it.
https://www.tessituranetwork.com/Help_System_v125/Tessitura_v125_Left.htm#CSHID=Price_Zone_Maps|StartTopic=Content%2FFacility%20Setup%2FPrice%20Zone%20Maps.htm|SkinName=TN%20Skin
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by Price Events or how I would set those. I see a price event feed when I right click on a price, but I've never even looked at that or noticed it before.
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As for the zones, you look to be 100% correct as far as that documentation goes. Since we do not do timed admittance, we have literally never once used that functionality, so I am not sure why it would not be working as you are correct, the documentation does appear to describe exactly what you said. One thought though, when did you enter those times into the price zones? Before or after building those performances? With a number of updates to the zone maps, you may need to repopulate data on the back end before the changes make their down way to performances that are already built. If you made those time entries before building the performances then they really should be working properly, and I might suggest clarifying what is going on by opening a support ticket.
As far as price events go, those are pretty easy to create. Simply go into a performance (or season manager), and instead of viewing the "Home View", hit the "Now" button or else enter the desired date and time. Make whatever changes you want to make, like raising the price by $5 or disabling sections, etc..., and save; done. Assuming that was made for a future date, the available zones, prices, etc... will remain as they were until you reach the date and time of that price event. You can tell if you have done it correctly because you will see a tiny calendar-like icon at the bottom left of each price zone/price type box.
They are rather handy at times, allowing you to see the initial price/status of a zone and/or price type and then what changes were made later due to sales, production needs for section closings, etc... If you are installing the utility I sent you regarding limiting price types by ticket counts, this is the functionality that it uses.
So if we wanted to set it per day per zone, would I need to go into each perf or write some sort of code that would update them on the back end? I'm not seeing a way to enter a relative date/time in season manager. :(
Probably that is what you would have to do then. I was not sure about that when I said that above. I would check open a ticket on that first part, because the documentation DOES seem to imply that is possible. If that does not work out, there should be something that could be done on the back end that is not too terribly different from that utility I shared with you.
If it needs to go that way for you, I would be happy to work with you to either create a second utility for this or find a way to update the utility to use for this as well.
Best of luck!
That note in the documentation is referring to adding buffer time in regards to relative zone sales layout functionality and best seating when no zone is selected.
Performance (Relative) buttons that are also using the relative settings for the price zone can end up disappearing/changing/going inactive the second of the zone time if you don't build in a bit of buffer as described in the note.
In the case of the best seat function, when you best seat without a zone selected it will skip price zones with zone times in the past.
Outside of those two functions, though, nothing prevents someone from manually selecting a price zone in the past (from a price zone dropdown or from the seat map).
I'll look at adding some more clarity to the note in documentation. Sorry for the confusion.
-Kevin
Thank you for clarifying, Kevin. I confess, I WAS curious as to how that would work in Tessitura in terms of disabling a price zone, and your explanation makes perfect sense in terms of best seating/buttons.
Brandi, depending upon what your set-up is for sales, this could potentially be a "good enough" solution that catches most things, though the fact that you brought this up seems to imply that you might need a further solution as well.