Hey everyone!
Our teams are discussing the costs/benefits of having guests choose a date of visit during their online purchase of general admission tickets vs a ticket expiring a year after the date of purchase (which is what we currently do) that can be used any single day.
What are you all doing? What works and what doesn't? We'd love to hear what you've experienced. :)
We at Mystic use date-specific tickets, to help us with predicting attendance, and for N-Scan purposes.
We also have what we call our Mystic Pass, which is attendance within a given time frame (generally mid-February each year, through the end of March the next year). This program is General Admission for the Aquarium, but also a local institution as well (Mystic Seaport). We have guests buy a ticket out of one large performance, set on 12/31 of each year. The N-Scan window for that performance is Feb-next March as mentioned.
Our staff one-site would then use a price type reason under a comp price type to log guests in under each day's General Admission performance, and the guest is given a card-stock ticket with tabs for the Aquarium and the Seaport. At the Seaport, their staff simply scan in the PAH using the N-Scanners we loan them, or they can take off the other tab from the card-stock ticket. It's a bit disjointed, but it's working so far! Apologies if the explanation is clunky.
We also sell many Gift Certificates. On-site, we will also honor older tickets, or tickets that need to be redeemed for a different date- we'll again use a comp price type reason code.
Adding one additional note on this process, for the guests who may need to visit on a different day than they originally purchased, we simply direct them to our will call line or any open admissions window to have the date changed to the actual day of their visit.