I'm not getting my hopes up, but I am wondering if anyone has had any luck in doing special pricing for aisle seats without simply adding new price zones to the map just to rezone those seats into? We just had a rental a few weeks ago that requested this at show build. They had 9 price zones so we had to have 18 price zones setup for the show; it was a rental so we just had to go along with it. And now another show is requesting this. This new show is a co promotion and will appear as part of our main season, so we get a say, but our leadership team thinks its a good idea. Our season shows usually use a 5 price map, that has 10 zones, 5 for the main floor and 5 for balcony to allow for easy discounts and repricing based on section. This is definitely the kind of show to want to increase prices on the floor, or do balcony only discounts, but I really don't want to have to create 20 price zones for a 5 price show. And it seems like this might be happening more often from now on. But if that is the only solution, then it is what it is.
I might be speaking before knowing enough about this, but would adding a pricing layer work, maybe?
How are you leaning on zone groups over the top of zones? It's not what you want but may give you some articulation in best available.
I noticed a trend for orgs to not display zones, just colour coding a map. Just a price range making it easier to dynamical price without explaining every price. I think James at Wales Millennium Centre calls then Microzones.
I've always wanted to get my grubby hands on the code behind pricing rules to see if we could trigger something on facility map features,
Pricing is still driven by the combination of Zone and Price Type. Adding a layer would allow you to, for example, exclude a fee from a certain price type or offer an add on like merchandise, but would still be driven by the price type and zone. I've been chewing on this and I think unfortunately additional zones are the only answer to this, as the zone is what connects the price type to the physical seat in the map. That's why in the facility map every seat must have a zone to pass the "validate completeness" check.
I unfortunately don't think you have an option besides making the 18 zones. There's no way (that I can think of, at least) to use Pricing Rules to fire on aisle seats since it's not in any of the criteria that you can use. As someone that once had to build a 24 zone map for a rental (not aisle specific, just a promoter that didn't know what they wanted and had never been in a venue our size) I empathize completely.
Jesse,
We have 7 prices and 26 price zones across what I call a 5 level venue. It is daunting but does allow us some flexibility. I agree with folks below that you will probably need to build this out. The best part sounds like since this is now a co-pro, make sure your voice is heard as to the 'optimal' zoning for the theatre and then push that zoning for any future rentals so you are only having to do this once regarding creating the zone map.
Jeff
I was looking into this since I had never worked with zone groups before. And it doesn't really solve the complicated show build issue, but from what everyone here has been saying, looks like we'll have to bite the bullet and just build all the price zones. But as you said the zone groups could come in handy in making things less complicated for the customers online.
I think Katina is right and we'd still have to build all these zones out to make it so that selecting a Regular ticket for an aisle produces a higher priced ticket. But depending on if discounts like student/youth, group, or subscriber discounts will or will not apply to this aisle "lift" charge, we could apply the lift charge on another layer, then if they want to add any pricing events, we can still use the paste special... option and not have to manually calculate all the new pricing.
Yes! This is how you could adjust the aisle price based on who is buying and if that upcharge should or shouldn't be applied. Price Type = Who Price Zone = Where Type + Zone = Final Ticket Price.
2nd this! I'd recommend building this zone map in Facility Manager instead of "painting" it onto the performance so that you have it in your back pocket for the future!!
Also to clarify, I like to think of ticket layers as "buckets", as typically the layer will have a different GL than the "ticket price layer" (ex: fees, merchandise add ons, etc) but not always - some orgs in our consortium use layers for dynamic pricing to break that out for reporting, even though it goes to the same GL as the ticket price layer. So, it's more like: Price Type = WhoPrice Zone = WherePrice Layer = What Type + Zone + Layer = Final Ticket Price.