Hello, and sorry to shout PERFORMING ARTS VENUES, but I just wanted to make it clear that I was not referring to museum timed entry, since that's a bit different:-)
As we plan (and hope!) to have patrons back in our actual space next year, the topic of how to control patron flow came up. How do you ensure that you don't have a bunch of people crowding elevators, doors, entrances, etc.? Do you have it so that the people sitting at the front of the theater need to arrive earliest, with folks at the back with the latest arrival times? Roughly how many people do you have for each arrival time? Where and how do you message this during the ticket purchase? Is there anything extra you do to get the audience to comply?
Are there any performing arts venues (that's a catch-all - theaters, dance companies, rental halls, etc) that have had experience/success doing this?
Not sure if this is helpful at all, but we are selling general admission only to our shows. We then inform the patrons that they will be assigned their seats at the time of their arrival. This way we don't have to worry about patrons crossing in front of each other for seating and we don't have to worry about trying to have patrons arrive at certain times. We do get patrons arriving early and we have them stand in socially distant lines. After their tickets are scanned, we then send the party of patrons to a table where our House Manager has a seating chart and assigns them seats, where they're not going to have to cross in front of any other patron, they write down the party's name and seat allocation (for contract tracing) and then hand the card to an usher to take the patrons to their seats. We save the cards, which have the patrons names and where they were seating, for a length of time should we need to reference them later.
Hi Amber,Thanks for the above. We are hoping to be able to people actual seats, but if not good to get the above outline of how you are doing it. Thanks, Donald