Multiple PDF templates for Print at Home Ticketing

Hi Christina,

We use mulitple pdf tickets and have no issues, however if you can consolidate some into a master one, you would be best to do so as creating the pdf's is very cumbersome.  We originally had multiple ticket designs for each venue and when we went to PAH, we brought that number down to 1 design for all main stage performances and then have 4 different designs for our ancillary events.

Michele

We have quite a few different designs though the main reason for this is to allow targeted up selling and promotion.  So for example the print at home tickets for a rock concert would have a specific ticket design, and the P@H template would have images and promotions for other rock concerts.  A ballet on the other hand would have another ticket design, with its own promotions.

This gives us great ability to upsell, but I'm told that is a nightmare to create, manage and maintain the separate ticket designs.

Unknown said:

This gives us great ability to upsell, but I'm told that is a nightmare to create, manage and maintain the separate ticket designs.

I second this...they are a nightmare!

We tend to have a different ticket design for each show that comes to the Royal Albert Hall and within that we also have different ticket designs for different price types, although the majority of these are not available on line for PAH.

I would try to consolidate as much as possible, as our Box Office find it takes a lot of time to set up the tickets.

One of the  issues to bear in mind is that it is possible for a MOS to be set to print, and for it to be sending PAH tickets without any issues because the ticket attached to the Standard price type has a template set up. Then somebody could  set up a new price type and add a different ticket design to that price type that doesn't have a template set up and you will soon find that you will get errors generating as soon as someone buys a tickets with that price type. The order will show in Tessitura as printed but no tickets will be sent out, so you need to make sure that before a price type with a new ticket design is made available that the pah template is also set up, or you will end up having to reprint a whole load of tickets (dependent on how much that price type is used before you set up the template). It is something we have seen on occasion, e.g.  when an offer has been set up and has a different ticket design set up due to a logo for the sponsor being needed on the ticket etc.

Caryl

Being able to consolidate is nice if you can, but it is even less possible to do this than with regular tickets, as you cannot embed any kind of logic in PAHT ticket templates (I.E. choosing to show one thing rather than another based on information about the purchase or the customer).  We use six templates, the same as our standard ticket templates, but we lack a number of flags and special fields that we typically show on those templates (for instance large blocks notifying ticket takers to check ID when certain price types/discounts have been used).

We have 13 different PAH ticket designs, though four are used most of the time.

As Gawain pointed out, with no logic in them, any tiny difference in ticket design means a new PDF, so there isn't as much consolidation possible as we might wish for.

Thanks, all, this is really helpful to hear about your experiences with PAHT templates.  From what I can tell in the documentation you just assign a PAH PDF for each of your ticket templates and at ticket set up you still assign your ticket template based on price type, right?

Yes Christina, that is correct. You create a pdf ticket design for each ticket design you assign to your price types.

If I had 2 performances using different PDF templates, how would I assign them in PAH configuration since those are based on MOS. And the same MOSs are used for both the performances?

Thank you Michele. That helped. The one other thing that I had to do was set the ticket design to 'None' in the paht_configuration so that it would pick the design associated with the price type.