Hello!
A local theatre company contracts us to provide their ticketing services. Each theatre production is performed 3-4 nights. For their next season, they are requesting to issue media vouchers instead of media tickets to radio stations for giveaway winners. This way the radio stations don't have to coordinate winner's names and which night they wish to attend. They want the winners to be able to redeem on site the night of the show of the winner's choosing. We typically forbid this because it creates all sorts of FOH and customer service issues to be issuing comp tickets while paying patrons wait in line. For this theatre company, none of their performances happen at our home venue, so we'd also be coordinating media comps on site via "mobile ticket office" which is more difficult than at home. We do have national touring shows who issue media vouchers (like Paw Patrol Live) and we have no choice but to accept them all the way up until the show, but all ticket managers and associates dread these nights because of the vouchers.
Does anyone allow redemption the night of show? What makes it successful? What do theatre companies consider "best practice" for this?
Thank you!
Erin
Hi Erin!
We do something kind of similar for our board members. They wanted a way to give a friend a free ticket to come whenever they want, so we created a business card sized cards for the board members with the following copy:
"Bring this card to Woolly Mammoth’s Box Office for one free ticket to [SHOW NAME] courtesy of Board of Directors member [BOARD MEMBER NAME].
Must be redeemed at the box office and surrendered at that time. Subject to availability. Valid through [END DATE OF SHOW]."
This has been a moderate success? We still have the issue of someone coming 30 minutes to show time to redeem the card, but with this there is still a transaction, and we collect the card as we would cash, and then give them a ticket. We have created a "Comp Reason - Board Card" to track the use of these as well- which speeds up the process. We have found that including "subject to availability" gives us some wiggle room to say "no we are sold out" or "the show has started" and double down on turning someone away if need be. We try to manage the expectations and make clear that the closer someone comes to show time the less likely a good seat will be available when we distributed these cards.
With the first iteration we tried to make the rule "must be redeemed at least two hours before show time" which was fine, but some people wanted more flexibility for it to be closer to time, so the "subject to availability" language came into play. We're still working on details but this is so far not the worst option, haha.