Festival ticket management - what's a good way of handling passes?

January 16, 2019 11:19 AM

I am helping to organize a theatre festival for the first time. We're thinking of selling passes for the entire festival. One issue is that if people with passes choose not to go to one of the shows, that seat goes empty. It would be nice if we could sell a ticket for that seat, but we definitely don't want to lock out the person who has a pass. What's a good way to maximize our ticket sales in this situation?
posted by storybored to Work & Money (8 answers total)

I don't know if this is a best practice or not, but could you say "passes are good as long as you're in the seat by x minutes to showtime" and then release those seats last minute if you're sold out?
posted by dismas at 11:28 AM on January 16, 2019 [8 favorites]

Do you have to have assigned seating?
posted by Seboshin at 11:29 AM on January 16, 2019 [2 favorites]

I'd give people with passes a list of shows, and they can book (for free) a seat at whichever they want. Some advice such as "please do not book seats that you don't intend to use, as this will prevent others from seeing the show" might be helpful.

Another option might be to keep a certain percentage of seats un-bookable, with the understanding that these will be reserved for pass-holders until 30 minutes before the performance. Any seats left unfilled at that point can be sold to anyone who turns up without a ticket. This will only matter if the performance is fully-booked. (On preview, similar to dismas' answer).
posted by pipeski at 11:31 AM on January 16, 2019 [9 favorites]

Some festivals require all-show-pass-holders to still pick up tickets for specific shows to attend them. They will sometimes reserve some or all tickets for members/pass-holders before a certain time, then it's first-come, first served. Exactly how long, how many would depend on your audience and festival. (Are they mostly super local people who could arrange to go to a show on an hour's notice? Are they travelling from a couple hours out? Are the shows short? Are some likely to be super-popular, others not so much?)

If the rules are set before the pass is sold, the buyers will understand that they are really getting a "get tickets to any show and have first choice" pass rather than "you can attend any show without notice" pass. And you need to be very clear about the terms.
posted by jb at 11:32 AM on January 16, 2019 [12 favorites]

my only experience with this was as an attendee at a tribeca film festival show. they solved this problem by offering rush/waitlist seats for folks who were totally ok with the possibility of not getting into a show. is your festival a big enough draw that people would wait in line to pay a discount to fill a last minute seat even with the possibility of getting shut out?
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 11:38 AM on January 16, 2019

Instead of passes, the festival I volunteer with does a bulk seating sort of thing -- if each event has a $15 ticket, we sell a "pass" for $120 that is a book of 10 coupons for tickets, which can then be exchanged for tickets as if they were buying them normally. This means seats aren't empty; as a bonus, pass holders can mix and match -- they could see 5 shows with a date, or see 7 shows by themselves and bring their parents to an 8th, or bring 9 friends to a single show; whatever works for them.

We also have a strict "no late entrance" policy -- very strict, it doesn't matter if you're the local theatre reviewer and also the mom of the artist, you get there once we've closed the doors, tough luck. In that case, for popular shows with high demand, we will resell prebooked noshow tickets at the very last minute (literally minute).
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 12:32 PM on January 16, 2019 [6 favorites]

My company does an annual New Works festival and it works broadly the way some folks above describe. For performances, most pass holders reserve their seats in advance. Their pass is basically a gift certificate for the value of the shows included in the package. We offer them advance sales, so they're guaranteed good seats if they take advantage. If they walk-up, there's no further charge for them, but seating is subject to availability. We haven't had serious problems with this system. I think Development would prefer it if VIPs could just stroll in with a fancy lanyard or something the way they do for fundraising events, but we haven't found a smooth way to facilitate that without creating the problem you describe.

I worked a large film festival that did walk-in passes, where they split the line in two between pass holders and single tickets, let the VIPs in first, then the singles, with the understanding that if it filled up, you were out of luck. It seemed to work better than I expected, but crucially it was General Admission, and there were multiple screenings of each film and like 3 running in each time slot, so if you got bumped from something you really wanted to see, you'd just watch something else and probably have another shot later. With a theater festival I think that may not work as well.
posted by Phobos the Space Potato at 12:50 PM on January 16, 2019

To reduce empty seats booking a pass could include choosing the shows that you'll attend, and an encouragement to let the staff know if you can't make one. Then you could sell single tickets for any shows that have spaces.
posted by Laura_J at 4:19 AM on January 17, 2019