Booking groups and school field trips online?

Hello!

Here at Mystic, we've settled on a hybrid approach, where we have details online, and General Admission online, but not full ticket-buying functionality for groups. Our Reservations department handles the scheduling and reservation side of things, and the groups would pay on-site when they visit. Here's a link to our website as it currently stands.

https://www.mysticaquarium.org/learn/schools-and-educators/

A confirmation (which I believe is an Excel document) with their totals, Order Number, and general information gets emailed out. When the groups visit, they would finalize the numbers each day, pay, and receive chaperone stickers and a group header to mark the tickets as 'Attended'.

We're always finding tweaks to make things easier, more fluid, but for the 2.5 years we've had with Tessitura, this setup has worked for us. We do get a large number of schools and school kids each year.

Hi!

We too are using a hybrid approach at Thinkery!  The teachers submit a request form online and I download those request to a spreadsheet and manually book each school.  We are always looking for ways to make our booking process more efficient. Since we get many chaperones we are looking into setting up online ticket purchase for field trip chaperones to purchase in advance.  We haven't quite figured out the logistics of this yet.    

Hi!

I think this depends on what e-commerce host you are using, but we have our curriculum-based School Programs online for booking. We just finished our first full school year online!

At a basic level this is instructions on how to book, skipping the main website with program descriptions:

• Use this link to access our ticket purchasing website https://websales.calgaryzoo.com/education/login/?next=/education/choose-school/
• You are now on the Educator Login page – use your regular zoo login if you have one or create one if needed. If you create a new account, you may need to use the above link again to access the Educator Login page.
• This is the point you will see a drop down list to choose your school – If your school is not on the list please let us know. You are now at a calendar to choose your programs.
• Navigate to the desired month – select a grade and program and time.
• If you do not see your preferred program on the list, it is unavailable. Please try another month or an alternate program.
• Once you have added a program to your cart, you can choose to book another program in the same order if needed.
• When you review your order you can choose to pay now or pay later. Please note, all programs must be paid for prior to the date of your visit.

We added a “school” constituency to all school CRM's in Tessitura so they will appear online. All school program production seasons have a grade keyword attached so they pull that program into the drop-down online once the grade level is chosen. So, if they pick grade 3, only grade 3 programs will be shown. Once they've chosen the date & time from the calendar, they fill in estimated student/chaperone numbers from more drop-downs. This is built in a way that prevents them from adding more people than we permit into a program. With either payment option they receive a booking receipt as soon as they complete the booking online. We then receive a report from Tessitura each day showing us who & what was booked online the day prior, so we can do the other scheduling on our end and follow up for payment if required.

We use a partly manual Word doc/Tessitura merge to create a confirmation letter that pulls from their order and we email it when payment has been received. We are looking at changing this for the next school year, but haven't figured out how exactly yet.

While this still takes work to set up and maintain, with our 1200+ school programs per year we no longer need to play phone or email tag to schedule anyone in - they do it themselves instantly! I would never want to go back to the manual process we used to have!

https://www.calgaryzoo.com/events/school-programs

Our bulk tickets for self-guided visits are still not available online.

Much like the comments already received, Georgia Aquarium uses a hybrid approach. They complete an online application and our sales team completes the booking. We do have a chaperone link that is available online and has to be paid in full. We are currently looking at options for the entire booking process to be online. Here are the issues, we use resource scheduling to arrange arrival times, classroom space and content. The last time I was made aware, resource scheduling is not supported online or through TNEW. We require a predetermined deposit amount and there are a lot of changes that occur before and after the final payment. Anyone know how to overcome these obstacles? 

Nicole -- I am intrigued by your chaperone link! Do you have an example you could share, or more details about the setup?

We use a combination of online form and then follow-up by our education team to complete the booking. For chaperones, we give the school a promo code to pass along to parents so that they can purchase tickets online in advance and get a discount. We no longer allow chaperones to purchase at the ticket window. This has drastically reduced lines at the ticket office when we have multiple school groups onsite.