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.