Offering Print at Home tickets on show by show basis?

Hello,

Do you use scanners for your tickets at the door? If so, even if scalpers try to copy the tickets the front of house staff will know that the tickets have already been used. I believe we also have a cap on the number of tickets that can be purchased online via print at home. The PAHT can also fail if the order is too big and the attached PDF too large for the patron’s inbox.

We have been pushing people to use print at home for a few years and it has streamlined our box office workload.

Gabriela  

Thanks, Gabriela!

We do use N-Scan at our doors.

I guess it's not as much scalpers (who are selling tickets at a higher price than face value) that we're worried about but the people who would try to sell counterfeit tickets by copying our PAH design.  Have you had much incident of that?

Hi Christina,

We have the option to turn off PAH for certain performances or for certain zones within a performance, this was work that we did with POP on our website. We add web content to a performance to Disable PAH for a show and add something to the config file for the website to disable the zone.

Having said this we don't turn off PAH for popular rock and pop shows. We haven't seen people duplicating the tickets at all as far as I know. We have NScan in place, and we scan at our doors into the building, so we are able to send any issues that do arise to the Box Office. This has limited the number of seating problems that our FOH team inside the auditorium have to deal with.

We do turn off PAH for standing areas where we need to ensure that we don't go over capacity at all. We know if someone has made a copy of the ticket for a seat then we will know that there is a problem when we have multiple people trying to sit in the same seat! We wouldn't have this luxury with standing areas and so as we need to make sure that we don't go over capacity (for Health and Safety reasons) we choose to turn off PAH for these areas and use the old system of hard tickets.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Caryl

Gabriella, Have you had much experience with counterfeit PAH tickets at the Goodman?

Hi Christina,

No, I don't believe that we've encountered any ticket counterfeiting. Last year we produced The Iceman Cometh and we did completely sell out of tickets. Occasionally we would have patrons calling the Box Office asking about listings they found on Craiglist. Since we could not guarantee their authenticity we would strongly discourage people from buying tickets from 3rd parties. 

In the end, I don't believe our Front of House staff had to deal with fake tickets.

Hope that helps!

Gabriela