We are looking to implement TPAHTS at BAM and have been having philosophical discussions about whether it makes sense to offer this service on very popular shows. The worry is that if the show is expected to sell out there may be more opportunity for scalpers to re-sell many print at home tickets since they are so easy to duplicate. In order to avoid a mess at the front-of-house it has been presented as a desire to be able to "turn off" PAH for these shows.
1. Is this even possible?
2. Have you/your organization done this?
3. Do you have good or bad experiences with scalped PAHTs that you care to share?
Thanks so much all!
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