Pre-sales stir up excitement with your audience and help create hype around your events. Many customers will pay more for early access which can help you maximize your revenue while giving your audience the level of preferred access that they desire.
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If you're looking to make ticket and/or pass sales available at different times. , here are a few common scenarios and how to implement them.

Allow passholders to reserve tickets before standalone tickets are on sale to the General Public by changing your event bucket mode to "Pass Only".

In Event Bucket Settings > Additional Settings, make sure "Allow Passholders to Order Tickets Online" is checked

As long as your pass rules have been set up correctly for all your pass buckets, your event will now only allow passholders to reserve tickets!
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Read our Help Article about Pass Bucket Troubleshooting and watch our Guide to Understanding Pass Rules video!

To end the pre-sale described above, change the Event Bucket Moade back to "Default".

and make sure that "Standalone Tickets on Sale to Public" is selected.

NOTE: You must do this manually, you cannot schedule a time to release standalone tickets on sale.

To allow only certain passholders to reserve tickets before standalone tickets are on sale, the process is very similar, except you can add an additional restriction to your pass rules to determine which passes can start participating in a pre-sale at which time(s).

As above, start by changing your Event Bucket Mode to "Pass Only".

In Event Bucket Settings > Additional Settings, make sure "Allow Passholders to Order Tickets Online" is checked

If you would like some Passholders to have access to the presale before others, consider using pass rule restrictions to determine when your passholders can start reserving tickets using the setting "Restrict based on the current time (when the pass is used to place the order)".
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Here is an example of a 3 day pre-sale where access is tiered using "Restrict based on Current time (when the pass is used to place an order). In this example, the Passholders' Pre-sale runs from September 1 to September 3, 2024 and standalone ticket sales start on September 4th.
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​Day 1: VIP Passholders, Industry and Media are allowed to order. This group will not need a pass restriction to limit the use of their passes.

Day 2: Festival Passholders, Volunteers and Staff are allowed to order. They will need a pass rule restriction configured to automatically allow them to start using their pass as of 12 am on September 2nd.
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Day 3: Ticket Bundles become active for the Passholder's Presale. Ticket bundles will need a pass rule restriction configured to automatically allow them to start using their pass as of 12 am on September 3rd.
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As long as your pass rules have been set up correctly, your event will now only provide access to passholders according to their pass rules. Read our Help Article about Pass Bucket Troubleshooting if you have any questions.

As with the previous example, this pre-sale is ended by toggling the Event Bucket Mode back to "Default". With the example of a Tiered Passholder Presale, this setting is toggled to Default at the scheduled time of the Public On-sale.

NOTE: You must do this manually, you cannot schedule a time to release and enable ticket orders.

To launch pass sales before passholder and standalone tickets are on sale, set the Event Bucket Mode to "Pass Only" and in Event Bucket Settings > Additional Settings, make sure "Allow Passholders to Order Tickets Online" is unchecked.

In the Configurator under the passes tab, make sure your passes are visible for sale buy completing the section called "Passes to Display" and then filling in the "Pass Details" section for each pass.

Now your event will now only allow pass sales, and not passholder ticket reservations or standalone ticket sales.
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​NOTE: This configruation is intended to help you get your tickets on sale while you are still building your events and creating your ticket allocations. This configuration doesn't replace the need for tickets. Tickets are still necessary to provide access to your events. Various analytics reports rely heavily on the use of tickets (sales analytics, attendee analytics, pass ticket analytics, etc.) and scanning.

To end this pass-only sale window, change your Event Bucket Mode back to "Default", make sure that "Standalone Tickets on Sale to Public" is selected, and select "Allow passholders to order tickets online" on your Event Bucket settings page.

NOTE: You must do this manually, you cannot schedule a time to release and enable ticket orders.