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?
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 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.
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.