Hello!
I have a question for this ticketing group who I have always found helpful when we are stuck on what to do next:
We are a presenting organization, and present performances at different venues. Sometimes, we run the full box office/ ticket scanning system directly through our own NSCAN and Tessitura universe, and other times for larger venues that have their own box offices and front of house systems, we basically stop selling tickets through our own system at some point, give that partnering box office our remaining seating inventory to sell through their system, and also provide them with our ticket barcodes in advance so they can upload in to their system so that our tickets will scan on their scanners.
We sell 'subscriptions' which result in single ticket orders - one order containing multiple performances in multiple venues. Historically, we have always used hard tickets for the early subscription orders before we go on sale with single tickets, and these orders are often unseated which we later seat manually. Given the uncertainty of what seating arrangements will look like in the fall, we will likely again roll out in an unseated environment and plan to seat the orders later - likely at different times based on the individual performances.
We are TNEW users, and have E-ticket functionality with that, however the issue there is 1) I understand it only works on TNEW orders, not within the Tessitura application and 2) we need to control the timing on when the tickets are printed - we can't have patrons print the ticket last minute because we need to provide the bar codes to some of the venues in advance of the performance so they can upload to their scanning system.
We also have the print at home server via Tessitura, however the behavior of the PAH server looks at unseated orders to print, not based on the individual performance line items.
So the only option I can currently think of is to sell subscription orders as we always do, where we have multiple performances in one order, and based on the timeline of when we need to seat and distribute tickets, manually delete these performance line items from the original order, put the funds on account, and then fully seat the applicable performances in a new order, when the PAH tickets will then send out after seating the order, the timeline we need to make it happen essentially.
Does anyone have any experience or insight on basically having the full control that the Batch Printing functionality in Tessitura has as applied to sending out contactless tickets? Thanks for any insight you have on this, this is a tough one for us!
Thanks!
Andrew
It might be interesting to learn more about the scanning system at the other venue, and how they upload your barcodes into their system. You may be able to allow PAH tickets as they are sold, and when you are ready to give the barcodes to the other system, I think you can pull a list of all of the ticket numbers in the performance and convert them to barcode - as long as you use the same code type as in your ticket design I believe it would match?
Thanks for jumping in, Anna! The systems range from other Tessitura users (not within a consortium, separate systems) to other 3rd parties. I essentially provide them with a list as you describe, based on an order export which has a column for the barcode number.
So I suppose, based on how PAH works, the timing issue isn't really a problem since the barcodes are generated soon after a sale. So if we can figure out a way to control the timing of when the barcodes/ PAH tickets are generated per show (multiple in a single order), the sharing of barcodes would be fine.
Thanks again,