Hi Daniel,
While we do not currently have any functionality that would help with this, we are considering it. The larger question at the moment is the financial feasibility of this for our members, and whether it is logistically feasible to handle other aspects of the event such as ingress/egress to the build and hall, bathroom and concession queues, and management of lobby space.
So far, where members have done the financial analysis, we've mostly heard that it would not be financially feasible for members to do social distance seating for events. As a result we haven't been moving forward with features to support it.
Would doing social distance seating be financially feasible for you? We're actively listening to this conversation across the community to help us make decisions around this.
Chris Szalaj
Product Owner, Business Facing Products
Tessitura Network
We’re still doing the analysis, but it’s looking like it might be feasible for us. We very rarely sell to anywhere near capacity, so we have some room in the hall semi-naturally. I’ll try to remember to report back once I hear more on the hard numbers!
Chris - We here at TPAC would be interested in what this would look like. While Broadway is most likely to not perform until it can with full houses, we have other events that might still happen and need some way to manage the social distancing aspect as it relates to assigning seats and timed entrances. We can easily adjust seating to our season ticket prior to any single ticket sales, but how do we do it once people are buying single tickets online?
I've seen some threads talk about using pricing rules, but I don't think pricing rules are "smart" enough to do what is really needed.
Thanks to you and everyone at the network trying to help us navigate these uncharted waters.
Chris thanks so much for your time on this. This is an exploration with no specific financial goal or application for our organization at this time. I have seen several venues come out with specific seating maps built for "social distance" where certain seats are marked not for sale from the outset. It seems that usually this means retaining 20-30% of the house's capacity (if for example seats are coupled together in pairs socially distant from other pairs). For our organization the average order number is not two seats though, it's three. Anecdotally it could be two parents and a child from one household. But if it's an order of one seat, then the paired seat would go unsold. Consequently, if we could dynamically optimize seating to set the social distance around an order of any seat number, after selection, then back-of-the-napkin math indicated we could maximize the house's capacity to 30-40%. Whether that's financially viable is another question entirely. Whether social distance in a venue works is also questionable, as I believe medical experts are indicating that the time spent in an enclosed space is the largely overwhelming variable in transmission, over social distance.