Complimentary tickets to a timed exhibition

Alison,

We handle most of our  comps for special exhibits just as you mention: voucher redeemable at the Box Office for a timed ticket. .All our tickets are GA  and the at intervals similar to yours, using zones for the timed intervals.

With the current King Tut exhibition, we were required to produce VIP comps, which grant immediate access to the exhibit without going to the Box Office, AND they had to be scanned at the TUT entrance. For these, we set up single  performance at the end of the run. They scan “wrong day” and so show up only  in attendance for the “performance” day ; but our TUT partners wanted it this way, and can add the VIP comps from the daily scan exception report, into daily attendance. If we saw large numbers of them daily, we might have set up VIP-Comp performances for each day. FYI, I do not recommend this VIP set-up. Asking patrons to stop at the Box Office to exchange for an actual ticket much better manages inventory and attendance tracking and has worked quite well for us with all past special exhibitions.

Hope this helps.

Ray.

Hi all,

We have a new temporary exhibition opening soon which will be timed entry and limited capacity (running every 30 minutes, 14 times a day, 7 days a week, 60 people at a time). We are needing to send out a number of complimentary tickets to invite people to see the exhibition, but don’t want to have to allocate them a specific date and time slot- we would like them to be able to choose when they visit. We therefore can’t print them as comp tickets for a specific day/time.

The best solution we have come up with so far is to make a voucher (outside of Tessitura) and then have the person either turn up on the day and redeem their voucher at our ticket desks or pre-book their timeslot through our Box Office phone line.

As we are new to Tessitura, we are wondering how other organisations are dealing with these sort of tickets?

Thanks,

Alison

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Alison,

It has occurred only rarely to date, and the 2 or 3 people have been easy to accommodate. That will pick up this summer as we get much busier and the exhibition’s end gets closer. That’s why I don’t recommend it, it requires gallery staff to micromanage capacities; I live in dread of 50 VIP’s showing up all at 1pm on a rainy Saturday. We use 15 minute entrance intervals which, are a bear to set up all those zones for a performance day, but really manages the visitor flow very well; with the added bonus that people tend to purchase tickets in advance on the hour or half-hour, which usually leaves us a bit of room on the :15 and :45, which we can sell as walk-up or use for VIPs etc.

Ray

Thanks for your replies Ray and Heather.

Ray- do you ever have any issues with the VIPs turning up for "immediate access" to a fully booked time slot, or did you put a hold allocation on some seats for every time slot?