Hi all! Here at GA Aquarium, we have always sold our programs on a seat by seat model. 1 person to 1 seat and not limited to booking party size (a person can buy 1 or all of the available seats per performance). Thanks to COVID, we are now exploring a model which would allow only 1 group to book the limited number of seats for the event. But, we would require them to buy a minimum number of slots (say 4) for the cost of the event. Even if they only want to bring 1 or 2 people, they would still need to consume the minimum seats in the event. But, we want to allow them to add additional seats for a per seat charge. So, they select the base (4) then can add either 1 or 2 more seats for a total of 6 max. The real question we are trying to answer is how to control those seats only being bought by 1 transaction vs. someone else buying the 5th or 6th seat. We can do this with price rules when it is say the Call Center or a person doing this and can control that. What about on the web (and, we have a custom solution with api calls for all of our web purchasing)? We have never used packages and have no familiarity with this functionality. We would still want to have the same number of barcodes as seats. Thank you all in advance for any suggestions.
We haven't used packages much, but I do believe you can set up packages to have a minimum and a maximum number of seats- require 4, max of 6, that sort of thing.
I'm not sure how that would work with the seats left over after someone buys only 4, but the packages route seems to be a way to set that up.
We ran into a similar problem with some of our modified encounter programs, where we wanted only one party to have the encounter at a time, but wanted that party to be able to book up to 10 humans for entrance. We ended up going with a one-seat seat map, but with 10 possible price types ('party of 2', 'party of 3', etc.) with scaling prices. It's a bit clunky, but it's worked out so far. This wouldn't apply directly to your situation, because only one scannable code would generate per price type.
No doubt there's a customization that could be coded up, but in the meantime, I'm not sure how to 1) have four seats available, and 5 or 6 available if needed but 2) not have only 5 and/or 6 purchased by people, all while 3) requiring a minimum of 4 seats booked. To my knowledge, there isn't a clean solution to this, if you want your purchase path to be customer-facing.