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 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..

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.

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.