Colonial Williamsburg is about a year out from implementation, but we're trying to figure out the best way to approach our B2B/third-party sales.
A significant portion of these sales are through AAA offices, but many of our customers are local hotels and timeshares that are gifting tickets or selling for a commission at a discount.
Currently, we use a system that generates a voucher, which must be redeemed on-site for a live ticket. This system does not talk to our current ticketing system, so agents have to record the redemptions in two systems.
Also, we are unable to sell tickets for limited-inventory events (tours, programs, etc.), because inventory would need to be managed manually.
We're open to suggestions.
Thanks.
The only thing we have that is similar is an annual event at Christmas that is put on by another museum and includes visits to multiple museums. Tickets are purchased via the other museum and when people come in to our museum with them, we issue them a (free) ticket for the event. That gets numbers of attendees in our system, but it doesn't transfer money (I'm not sure what we receive from this event, but I would imagine it is a check when it is over and it doesn't get processed via Tessitura).
I'm relatively new to Tess and don't know that I understand the full needs of this situation, but two and a half options come to mind. I don't know if either of these exactly work for your use case, but your implementation specialist may be able to reconfigure these pieces to work.
1. You could set your business partners up with user accounts that can access the Quicksale POS screen that you can configure to sell tickets to whichever events they need at whatever prices they need. You can use sources or back solicitor/worker profiles to track who is selling what and commissions. Downside is that it takes a minute or two to log into Tessitura, so customers will have to be a little patient. Also, if payment is needed, they will need to either have secondary, proprietary credit carder readers dedicated to this system, or they will have to type in the CC number by hand (only options as far as I know).
2. You could maybe use a designated mode of sale in TNEW to let the business customers do this online? This works better if you don't need to collect the visitor/recipient contact info. But even if you don, maybe you could make it a CSI or checkout form. You can either give businesses a constituency that triggers a mode of sale shift when they log in, or you can give them a promo code that triggers a mode of sale shift. The downside to this option is that if payment is needed, it would look like the business is buying and paying for the ticket because that's who is logging in. If you want, you can set up this mode of sale to enter reservations for tickets, instead of paid tickets. Then the visitors can pay when they show up at the front desk.
2a. Alternatively, you could give each business partner a custom URL with a promo/source code pre-applied that they can give or link their customers directly to, to reserve the tickets themselves. Then you would use the promo code/source to track where the tickets are coming from.
Hope I understood correctly and this makes sense!
I would second Gabbi's suggestion of using a different mode of sale on a specific TNEW/Custom page that you could give to these outside parties so they could purchase tickets directly from your inventory. There are also companies like Trip Advisor and Ingresso which sell tickets from your inventory by using an API connection, so it is possible if you have the resources to create a custom API solution.
I didn't even know Trip Advisor could connect via API. That's great to know!
We do this with Visit Houston; they have a special MOS and connect via API.