Parking who does it well?

Hi Eva!

We don't have any slick integrations: we've investigated some partners in the past, though I suspect all of the parking vendors with Tessitura integrations are based in the US.  As it is, we have a small number of spaces available in a handful of lots scattered across the university campus which we basically buy from the university.  Because they are so limited in number we only sell or comp them as a membership perk.  We use the Entitlements customization to manage allotments (i.e. members of certain levels get X parking spaces a year free, can further purchase Y parking spaces).

To support this we have:

• The allotments are of course advertised along with all promotional material for memberships.
• A custom header for box office cashiers to see at a glance how many allotments and of what kind a member has remaining; the Entitlements customization still provides a hard limit on purchases.
• We have the TNEW Entitlements Plugin, which handles cases where the allotment is exceeded with a useful informational page and also has an overview page that members can view (when logged in) to see their current allotments.
• We create parking "performances" to manage inventory, one for each event with the facility set to the appropriate lot (we have multiple venues).  The performances are only available to members whose level is sufficient to buy parking, this is handled by rankings which drive web MOS.  Visibility of the comp price type is also controlled by (higher) rankings/MOS.  Entitlements still control the allotment.
• Parking performances have a specific Perf Type, allowing us to configure them differently in TNEW with instructions to direct users to log in or consider getting a membership when they don't have access and providing links to the Entitlements Overview page.
• Parking performances do not appear in the Event Listing.  instead, we have links in the Performance Additional Cart Text so that once a customer has bought a performance and is in the cart they can be immediately directed to the right parking performance, and also they can purchase multiple performances and then come back and choose parking options.  Others use messaging rules for this, but that has two problems: 1) to have direct links to the right parking event you have to have hundreds of messaging rules (not recommended) and 2) the message only appears one time in the cart, so if you buy a second performance, you no longer have access to the parking link for the first one.  We actually have a custom JavaScript that allows us to hide or reveal text based on MOS, so people who aren't eligible won't see the link.  There is a TNEW Plugin for selling additional items along with a performance purchase, but it isn't sophisticated enough to only show the options to certain customers, and I don't think it would work with packages (most of our parking sales are combined with "subscription" package sales) so we don't use that.
• Granting access is very basic: before the event (we shut off parking purchases well ahead of events) we print up a seating book, and have a staff member act as parking attendant.  They are merely checking names, no ticket taking or scanning.
• One wrinkle is that the ranking/MOS part breaks down a bit when selling packages, since they use their own MOS.  We simply make parking performances (and both price types) available to the package sales MOS (since Entitlements prevent sales to non-members) and include text explaining that the benefit is only available to members (join today!).

Phew, I think that's it?

Hi Eva!

We sell parking in Tessitura. Each different lot or garage is a section of a parking performance. We have created one integration with Tiba parking which is based out of Israel. We are also planning to write another integration into iParc for a different garage. Valet parking just uses our N-Scan devices.  If we have other locations they receive a scheduled seat book that is emailed to them and check names off the list. 

With the integration into Tiba parking we send the ticket number out to Tiba so our tickets from Tessitura can be scanned by their scanners at the parking garage.

We customized our website so that a single parking event will be available for any show that matches the time or is within 3 hours before the performance time.

We only sell parking to guests who have tickets to our shows. Parking only appears as an optional upsell to ticket orders on the web.

I am happy to discuss further details if you want to reach out to me directly.

Nicole

nkeating@arshtcenter.org

Hello Eva,

Like Gawain, we also have no slick integrations, and our parking garage is actually free (yet customers still find a way to complain), but we put together a pre-paid system for valet that worked very well pre-pandemic (still not yet back up and running right now, so I cannot show you an example).  It might have not been the slickest, but it worked just fine, and our pre-sold valet usage and valet usage in general definitely jumped off after implementation.

Essentially how it worked for the patron is this.  Patrons added an event to their cart, and, if that event was in the correct venue and offered valet, the website would load a precart page with a link to the associated prepaid valet event.  They could add one to their cart, or just click no thanks and go about their business.  That would offer them a valet pass.  We then gave a list of active ticket numbers to the Valet attendants the night of the show, and they checked those off against the pre-sold vouchers as they were turned in/shown to the valet attendants.

To make that work on the Tessitura side of things, I built a pre-cart page that looked for a Content tab item on the performance.  If there existed a valet content tab item, it would then look at the number of that item, which the Box Office would enter as the performance number for the associated Valet event.  Pre-sold valet was I think $1 or $2 off the full price (never having used it myself I forget the exact number).

Best of luck!

John A. Moskal II

Hi Gawain, thank you for taking the time to answer my question :-) We are hoping to do it without doing too much in Tessitura as we have decided that everything that is not related to performance booking should live outside of Tessitura, but still feed information back to Tessitura to keep Tessi as our datawarehouse. I am still unsure what we are going to do..

Hi Nicole, thats sounds a lot like what we want to achieve. I will write to you directly :-)

Hello John. Thank you for taking the time to answer me. I like that you can easily just say yes to parking during your purchase flow, thats what we want. We need to be able to offer different kinds of parking, electric, non electric, handicap, and limit these to a number of spaces. How do you make sure you do not offer more spaces than you have? Thanks Eva

With it being Valet, we have an advantage there of generally not having to worry about tons of different kinds of accessible parking, etc... as the valet attendants would take care of that inherently.  But even still, for us it is as simple as just restricting the number of spots per zone in the Valet event "facility".  E.g. X number of electric spots, Y number of accessible spots and Z number of regular spots.  Once the zone reaches capacity, that is it.

We also RARELY ever had capacity as an issue.  What with ours being valet, the valet company and drivers themselves always wanted to make more money, so they would always find a way to try to expand capacity if we ever got near it.  Especially as every car that was valet parked would just be one fewer car that would self park manually in our garage, thus that space became "available" for the valet company to use it as long as the employees were willing to run just that much further to park/retrieve it.

Ok, thanks :-)

I was going to direct you to the Purchase History radiobutton on the History Tab, but the documentation says "Coming Soon", so I'm not sure if that's ready for prime time yet.