Venues will eventually be allowed to re-open to the public after the confinement period. However it is possible that this will happen progressively and only if venues are able to implement social distancing restrictions. Depending on the actual physical layout of venues, the difficulty of implementing such restrictions may vary greatly. Nonetheless this article contemplates how it could be implement on the seat map and more importantly what it will mean in terms of customer journey.
Configuration
For small venues, the configuration would simply require creating a new logical configuration to invalidate certain seats by manually selecting them on the map.
For larger venues, manually invalidating seats would be challenging. However using the sparsity selection feature could help in that process, for example, invalidating every other row and then only manually invalidating every other seat on the remain rows.
Purchase
With such a configuration, optimal selection of seats will be impacted. No two free seats will be contiguous and the segmentation pattern will always result in seats being allocated one by one.
For example, requesting 3 seats will systematically be treated as 1+1+1, meaning the system will first find the best available seat, then the best one remaining and again for the last one. Depending on the optimal selection configuration of the venue, those 3 seats may be in very different parts of the map.
In such a scenario, we would thus recommend to let the customer select his seats directly on the map. The resulting would still not be contiguous but it would probably limit the frustration coming from being allocated very far apart.