The Ticket Master

Phil Hayes

One of the most frequent pieces of feedback we've received about our Crew system is how time consuming it can be to move tickets around the event. Due to the way that events are configured in a hierarchy, distributing tickets to groups at the lowest levels was always ... well, a bit of a pain, if we're honest.

When we reviewed the system for the 2015 festival season three limitations of the current ticket distribution approach became clear:

  • It is time consuming to distribute tickets to the lowest levels of the event hierarchy because you have to pass them down through the higher levels first
  • It is also time consuming to take tickets away from a group which doesn't need them and pass them to another group which does
  • Due to these two constaints some event organisers were structuring their event without taking full advantage of the event hierarchy.

We are super excited to announce that the Crew system now has a new way to distribute tickets, which makes it much quicker and easier than before.

When distributing tickets to a section - any section - you'll get a slightly more advanced dialog than the one you're used to:

To the right of each ticket type you can see how many are available to distribute to this section. Taking Crew Child as an example, you can see that there are none available in Area One to give to Group One (the group we're currently managing).

When we enter a quantity for Crew Child the interface warns us that this isn't possible:

But, unlike previously, we can now change the drop down list to indicate where else in the system we'd like to take these tickets from:

The dialog will let you take tickets from any level higher up in the event hierarchy. Therefore, if you're managing a group there are potentially 3 higher levels you can take tickets from.

If you decrease the number of tickets then the system will give you a choice about where the spare tickets should go back to. In this example I have decreased the quantity of Crew tickets to 23 which means there are 10 spare. They have to go somewhere and the system is giving me the choice of where they should go:

Finally, as if that wasn't enough, you can also enter an adjustment to the number of tickets. In the example below I am decreasing the number of Crew tickets by 5 and increasing the number of Artist tickets by 10:

This new interface really does make it faster to move tickets around your event. It makes it clear as to where tickets are coming from, and where you're releasing them back to. You can move tickets from the top to the bottom of your event in just a few clicks, rather than tediously moving them through all the layers.

We've enjoyed building this new feature and we hope you enjoy using it just as much.