Greetings,
I am trying to find a way to make it easier for our patrons to find seats for our shows online. We are very fortunate in that most of our performances sell out well before the performance date. Because of this, when a patron goes online looking for seats, they end up choosing a performance to find out it is full and after doing that several times, they get frustrated. We allow exchanges so the houses are always in flux and I can't just go on and make it so only dates with seats available show up on-line (this would be a full time job constantly changeing the web-publish dates). I'm trying to find a way to let patrons click a button and be automatically taken to the dates that have availability, like a beast seat map spread across every performance date. Has anyone done something like this?
Portland Center Stage has their site programmed to list performances as either Available, Few Seats, or Sold Out (http://pcs.org/). If I remember correctly the calculations were hard coded for each venue and based on the availability numbers returned by the GetPerformance method (I don't remember the specific version of the call used). Patrons still need to search through several performances if they are looking for specific seats, but they at least have a ballpark idea of which dates have more available.
We have a script that searches for performances within specific criteria and if a performance has less than a set number of seats (we set this) it will automatically add web content to a performance to say it is sold out (it also will remove the web content if more seats become available).
We worked with our website developer to then have our website show next to the performance in the Whats On section if a performance was sold out and to show in the date drop down (for a run of shows) when a show is sold out, so the customer could see the information in several places.
Caryl
Caryl, That sound very similar to what we'd like to try. Do you know who your web developer was?
We use Pop for the development.
Thank you so much, this gives me a lot to work with!
I also meant to say, that if you want to see the SQL for reference, I am happy to send it over, it is very particular for business, but you are more than welcome to have it.
Hi Caryl,
I would definitely like to take a look at the SQL, if you don't mind posting it. We'd be interested in implementing something like this. Thanks!
Brian