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
Hey Andrew. We are a presenting org and just delivered 2 successful productions. The trick with us over the last 6 months is that theatre capacities seem to change when we are onstage - and of course the team wants to maximise the inventory by matching that. So back when we were at 50% theatre capacity I decided to sell into a GA house then 48 hours prior
#2 is a bit more involved and need some unpacking ie: whether you use an algorithm or seat it by hand. Also you have to be careful that you have the capacity depending on your rules
I wanted to use Mobile tickets but the lack of support for tickets sold in the client was a serious issue. PAH was fine though and we kept our preshow and covid warning messaging to the cover email that the PAH was attached to.
Confirmations and booking were all set up with info that seats would be allocated 48 hours prior to performance and to please tell us of any access requirements - that went very smoothly
By doing this I managed to maximise our revenue and squeeze every dollar out of the theatre without compromising the comfort (distancing) of the patrons and being agile to change capacities within 48 hours. Hard work though.
Wow Heath thanks so much for detailing this case study! I have never thought about incorporating order imports in to the mix somehow...there might be something here for me. I'm thinking maybe preserving the original orders in some way, seating them manually, and creating a duplicate season purely for ticket distribution. And, since we owe the barcodes to the venues in advance of the performance, we could easily make that cut off in terms of any changes to the orders on our end. Much to contemplate!!
One follow up question -- since you sat everyone all at once via order import, did you have any backlog issues with your PAH server handling the volume?
So for the GA bookings (and the import) i used a new Delivery Method eTickets Prior to Performance. When I'd checked the import to make sure that my logic was ok and there weren't any mistakes I ran a little SQL script (stolen from Krystal at SOH for their Delayed Digital Delivery) and changed the delivery method ID in T_ORDER to PAH and away they went. I only changed the eTickets Prior to Performance delivery as we held some orders with Tickets in Hand or COBO for donor functions and printed physical tickets. There was no issue with the backlog. They all went out pretty quickly. We did have an ongoing issue with our BCC email address falling into RAMPs email suppression but that's another long term puzzle.
Oh interesting that you were able to simply change the delivery methods on the orders! Would you be able to share that script at some point? I have a help ticket open with Tessitura support and I am going to link to this chain as a potential approach to the solution!
update T_orderset delivery = 2 from T_order oJoin T_lineitem li on o.order_no = li.order_noJoin T_SUB_LINEITEM sli on li.li_seq_no = sli.li_seq_nowhere li.perf_no = 1028 and o.delivery = 9 and sli_status = 3
You're always so helpful, thank you! I will update you on where we land on this!
Hey no worries. It was a thought experiment that became a reality. I feel your pain and I'd rather share the wins that have you struggle through it alone. NB/ with the calculation of % house and whether your physical seating rules (like one seat distancing or checkerboard) can handle it I wrote out a guide internally so that we were all on the same page. It's because it comes down to the probability of order size and the likelihood of you being able to fit them in and I can share it if you like. It's pretty basic but it gets across the ideas as best I could.