Ticket Bundling

#1

Hi all!

There may be an obvious solution to this and I’m too brain dead to see it but…

How do you go about offering ticket bundles that aren’t subscriptions? We’re hoping to have two shows this summer and we would like to offer a deal that if you buy a ticket to each show, the tickets are cheaper than if you just bought a ticket to one of the shows.

An example would be, all tickets are $15 but if you buy one ticket for both Show A and Show B, your total would be $20 and not $30.

Is it possible for this to automatically apply the discount in the cart once it sees you have both Show A and Show B in there? Or would this need to be a coupon code we give out?

Thanks!

#2

Hi @mthacker - you can definitely setup a coupon code to discount these tickets for both events, but I don’t think you can automatically control that the coupon isn’t redeemed with both specific events in the order. Essentially, in each order you are looking to force a minimum number of tickets across multiple specific events and also check the ticket count for each event against the other. I think this would need a plugin.

There are a couple of options without a plugin though. You could set this particular promotion to only work over the phone rather than the internet and your staff can control the usage. This is probably the simplest option.

You could let the coupons work online and setup a workflow notification to alert your staff when a new sale comes through using the coupon promotions. This would let your staff keep an eye on these web sales and contact patrons after the sale if they need more or different tickets to qualify for the discount. (Putting explicit instructions in the external coupon notes with html links to add tickets to each specific event may help make it easier for your patrons to process themselves correctly.)

Depending on the use case, I suppose that you could also setup a placeholder event where 1 ticket is the combined $20 price and then your staff can manually book the correct tickets for the real events. While fun to brainstorm, though, this solution seems extreme for most bundling needs :slight_smile:

Hope that helps - I know there are other users who’ve made promotional bundles and who may have different feedback!

1 Like
#3

Thank you so much! I’ll keep playing around with it and see which of those would work best for us.

I’m curious about the package feature - have you used that before for anything like this? We’ve never used that here.

#4

The subscription packages feature? Yes we use them heavily for our season subscriptions and even some smaller event packages that we put on-sale as a collection before they go on-sale individually. There’s a lot of great help page notes on this if you’re interested - does your organization have subscriptions currently or are you thinking about starting a subscription option?

#5

We do use subscriptions currently! I was thinking I couldn’t build these two summer shows as a subscription because a) they’re general admission and b) I don’t want to mess up the subscriptions we’ve already built for normal seasons and lose all of our patrons’ favorite seats.

What are your smaller event packages? Do they interfere with your regular season subscription process?

#6

Our smaller packages don’t interfere at all - we process them as totally different subscription packages with their own little control houses. We do this for things like our National Geographic Speaker Series and our global “Passport” music series, each of which has 4-6 events per year and we put on sale as a group with a small discount to buy all of them up front. Ours our reserved seating, though. I’ve never looked up doing a subscription with general admission events - anyone else?

We’ve used passes too, which might work great for a mini package of general admission events. You can direct link to the pass online and then patrons can redeem that pass for general admission tickets at their leisure. You can attach a sales rule to the pass (probably # admissions type) so that when patrons redeem they get the “package” discount. The benefits are that it’s a super easy sale from a patron’s perspective and it gives you a lot of flexibility on the back end. Easy to switch out/add valid performances if needed, easy to report on who hasn’t yet redeemed all their admissions yet, etc. Patrons can redeem online pretty simply too. As an extra convenience, you can have people auto add to a mail list when they buy the pass too I think. We use this method for our flexible subscriptions and it works great.

Does this sound like a possible solution for your need?