Season tickets or subscription packages are increasingly offered as a means of encouraging greater attendance to events and ensuring a high level of pre-sales. But incorporating season ticket sales functionality in a ticketing system is quite complex, and even more difficult for online sales.
There are two basic types of season tickets.
A customer chooses tickets from a number of pre-defined events in a season. In the simplest scenario, an organization may be holding just a few events in a season with only one performance of each event. The Season Subscription in this case offers a discount for purchasing tickets to all events in the season.
A slightly more complex option is where customers can choose from different subscription options – e.g. in a season with events A, B, C and D, Subscription Series 1 may comprise events A and B, Series 2 may combine A, B and D and so forth.
Such subscriptions are relatively easy to set up and a box office using a ticketing system will normally be able to allocate the same seat numbers across all the events in the Season subscription automatically (assuming they are not already sold).
With a Season Package, a customer chooses specific events from a season, which may comprise several different programs (for example a playhouse), where each program will have a number of performances on different dates. So in this case, the customer is not only choosing specific programs from a group of available programs, but is also selecting the performance dates they require, and specific seat numbers.
Once again they would receive a discount for selecting say 4 programs from 6 available programs and a different discount for selecting 3 programs from the available 6.
Whilst many ticketing programs should be able to handle this scenario for subscriptions purchased by mail order, telephone or from a box office, it’s much more complex to offer this type of season package for online purchases.
Even more complex is the situation where events in the season are held in different auditoriums with different capacities.
InterTicket however can handle both Season Subscriptions and Season Packages, including events held across different auditoriums. Unlimited combinations of subscriptions and packages can be created.
Online customers are also able to purchase both Season Subscription and Season Package tickets.
With Season Subscription tickets, customers go to a dedicated season ticket page, select the desired subscription series and then select their seats from the seating chart. The system will automatically select the same seat number for all events in the series – the seating chart will only display seats that are available across all these events. After selecting the seats and making payment, the customer is emailed a voucher number and requested to either present the voucher in person to the box office or telephone the box office and request the actual tickets to be mailed to them. The customer can either receive a single ticket which lists all the events in the season or individual tickets for each event.
PDF print-at-home tickets are not an available option for season subscriptions.
With Season Package tickets, the customer again goes to the dedicated Season Ticket page and selects the required Season Package. The customer pays for the Season Package ticket and receives an e-mail with a voucher number. As with the Season Subscription tickets, the customer must either telephone the box office or visit in person. The customer then quotes the voucher number and advises the box office personnel the particular events and dates within the season package for which they require their tickets. The customer is either mailed the tickets or they are issued to them in person.
Where organizations have long-standing arrangements with customers being allocated specific seats, InterTicket allows you to easily "roll over" all subscriptions from one season to the next, retaining the same seat numbers, with just 2 clicks of your mouse. The seats for all existing season subscribers are automatically designated as “reserved” for the new season. The subscriber is given a specific date by which they must pay for the tickets, otherwise the tickets are automatically returned to the system for resale.
InterTicket also enables deposits to be taken to secure a Season Subscription and specifies a date by which the balance must be paid, otherwise the tickets will be returned to the system for resale.
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Anyway… last night was our first show using the Tickets system, and all-in-all it went stupendously!!! I’m glad we found you. You are very nice to work with.
In the UK, other ticketing software was very expensive - for us the Tickets program is perfect. The customer service is second to none.
