You provide your audience with a type of experience where enjoying it together is more important than having the absolute best seats still available. This is typical the case of larger venues, like stadiums. This new feature allows you to ensure that people will be seated together in the same block or area.
Combined with min/max limits on tariffs, this new feature will allow you to sell private skyboxes, e.g., a group of seats that can only be purchased together.
Problem/Solution
Historically, the seat allocation algorithm was optimized for smaller venues for which the individual experience of each spectator was more important than being seated together, like being able to see the hands of a pianist for example. However, this was not well suited for larger venues where being a few rows higher or off-centered does not impact significantly the experience.
The new feature thus allows defining for each logical seat category, if the automatic and manual seat allocation should be restricted to a single block/area or not.
Getting started
From the logical configuration of the Venue module, a new Single block/area restriction option is available in the configuration of a logical seat category. Three possible settings are available:
- None (default): By default, there is no restriction. This is the current behavior where the system will assign the best seats but potential even if they are in different blocks.
- On automatic seat selection only: With this setting, the system will assign the best seats but strictly within the same block/area. This mean that when availability is low, the system might not be able to assign seats because the available seats are not all in the same block. In order to sell the last seats, customers would be required to select the seats manually on the map.
- On both automatic and manual seat selection: This setting extends the restriction to manual selection on the map. It is useful to setup a seat map with private skyboxes. By combining it with a special tariff with a min/max, it allows forcing the purchase of an entire block of seats, so as soon as one seat is selected in a block, the following seats can only be chosen in that same block.
Please note that this configuration is closely related to the segmentation configuration described here, in particular when a customer request more than 6 seats in the default segmentation configuration. Indeed above 6 seats, the system will split them in two sets in order to optimize the quality of the seats rather over seating together. This segmentation configuration can be adjusted through a service.