Types of Holds In GA Performances

Hi folks -

Wondering how other organizations differentiate between types of holds in general admission performances. Being a festival, virtually all of our shows are general admission, so we’re not able to make types of holds like we would using reserved seating. My current system is to hold a pool of tickets and use a spreadsheet to break those down into different categories, updating the spreadsheet as I book those holds. I’d love any suggestions, as this feels very clunky with lots of room for error.

Does anyone have a more streamlined solution for this, or are there any plans to do types of GA holds in the future?

Cheers,

Sarah (she/her)

Hi Sarah,
I don’t have a way of doing this less manually, however, there is the ability to hold seats without putting in fake sales that you might want to try. It’s on the Accounting tab of the event.
First, find the event that you’d like to modify the holds and double click it. Go to the Performance tab. Double click the performance you want to change. Then go to the Accounting tab. On the far right, there’s a box that looks like this:
image

You can update the Held Seat Count and it will remove those seats from inventory and place them on hold. As you sell them on your manual spreadsheet, you’d have to also remove them from the held count. Not a ton better than what you’re doing, but maybe a little easier to keep track of actual seats sold without having to subtract your fake tickets from the count.

Hope this helps!
Jeffrey
SLOC Musical Theater

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Thanks for your response, Jeffrey!

To clarify, I meant that I have been holding seats through the Accounting tab, and taking them off hold as needed, then updating my spreadsheet. I haven’t been booking fake tickets. I’d just like a better way to categorize my held tickets in TM if possible, especially as I start to have other staff in the box office booking comps.

My apologies for misunderstanding!

We rarely do GA events, and when we do, they don’t sell out. Maybe someone else will have a suggestion that’s actually helpful. :slight_smile:

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Hi @sarah.s! We don’t do festival style events often so I’m sure your needs are complicated than ours have been, but happy to help brainstorm some ideas.

One option would be to create one or more “festival holds” patrons and sell group ticket to them. So there could be a “house use festival holds” patron with a group ticket worth 60 admissions and a separate “corporate sponsor festival holds” patron with a group ticket worth 40 admissions. They will show up in the event’s Attendance tab so you can see the purpose and quantity easily and it will control the available admissions left on the event for the public. You would still need to go in and edit the admissions on the group tickets as things were sold to real patrons, so may not meet your needs that way. It will also make the Sales tab look as if all “holds” are real.

Hm, maybe you could sell individual (versus group) tickets to a single “festival holds” patrons but make sure to use correctly named comp promotions. So the patron might have 60 tickets sold with a comp-house promotion as well as 40 tickets sold with a comp-sponsor promotion. When it’s time to hand these tickets off to real patrons, you can either gift them to the real patron or, if they’re booked on individual orders, transfer the entire order to the real patron. This option will let you use the Attendance tab to see how many of a “hold type” are still held versus in use. Like the above idea, this will makes the Sales tab appear as if all “held” admissions are truly booked.

Uh, let’s see, what else can we brainstorm? You could setup a dedicated performance within the event for each major “hold type”, setting the Quantity to Sell/Report amounts accordingly and making only the public performance available online. I suspect managing total capacity this way is challenging, though it means you are only selling when you are in fact ready to sell to a real patron so the Sales tab will be accurate and you can reference the Performance tab for remaining available by “hold type”. To change amounts, you will still need to manually adjust the public performance and “hold type” performance’s Quantity to Sell/Report.

Perhaps the simplest option is to use the event’s Marketing tab to manually record how many of each “hold type” there should be and align each type with a sales promotion for the box office to easily compare sales versus allotted quantities. If total capacity is a concern, then you may still need to manually adjust the performance’s Quantity to Sell/Report, but the benefit of the Internal Marketing Notes is their visibility within an order for internal box office reference.

Not sure if any of this is better than your spreadsheet, but hopefully some wacky ideas here that can help move the brainstorming process along on your end!

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Hi Sophia, thanks for the brainstorm!

These are some great ideas to get me started. I like the idea of noting hold allotments in the Marketing tab - that could definitely be useful for visibility for other box office staff.

Cheers,

Sarah

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