Advance Ticket Reservations for Passholders are a helpful tool to help your audience plan their festival and guarantee their entry into all of the events that they are really looking forward to, but for some pass types, you may choose to disable this requirement and allow for walk-up admission using instant tickets. Instant tickets can be issued by the scanner to all pass types, regardless of whether or not they are enabled for advance reservations.
The requirement for Advance reservation for passholders can be configured in three places, in the Event Bucket Settings, Physical Event Settings and in the Pass Bucket General Settings.
Configuring Advance Reservations for the Event Bucket (Instant Tickets)
To set the default requirement for Advance Reservations for Passholders, open your Event Bucket Settings and click “Open Additional Settings”.
Under the heading “Pass Settings”, you’ll find a setting for “By default, require passholders to reserve tickets (overridable on a per ticket bucket or per-event basis)”. By leaving this setting checked, by default all of your passholders will be able to use their pass to reserve tickets (either online or via the box office) in order to guarantee their admission to your events.
If you uncheck “By default, require passholders to reserve tickets (overridable on a per ticket bucket or per-event basis)”, your passholders will not need to redeem their passes online for any tickets and they will be granted walk-up admission to your events with instant tickets if capacity is available. If you uncheck this setting, it is a really great idea to add custom text to your pass order confirmation emails about your admission practices and policies.
Configuring Advance Reservations for Physical Events
If you would like your advance reservation requirement for a specific Physical Event to be different from the default advance reservation requirement that has been set for the Event Bucket;
Click Edit on the physical event and look for the “Passholder tickets” setting which is located about half way down the page.
Uncheck “Use default event bucket setting”
Select one of the following; “Require passholder ticket reservation in advance (“RSVP”) or “Do not require advance reservation; allow passholder walk-ups”.
Configuring Advance Reservations for the Pass Bucket
If you would like your advance reservation requirement for a specific Pass Bucket to be different from the default advance reservation requirement that has been set for the Event Bucket;
Click Edit on the pass bucket and look for “Advance reservations” in the "General" settings tab.
Uncheck “Use default event bucket setting”
Select one of the following; “Require passholder ticket reservation in advance (“RSVP required”; overridable on a per event basis)” or “Do not require advance reservation; allow passholder walk-ups”.
Setting Hierarchy
The setting on the event bucket will become the default setting for all physical events and all pass buckets.
The physical event setting overrides the event bucket setting, but not the pass bucket setting.
The pass bucket setting overrides both the event bucket setting and the physical event setting.
Example Use Cases using the Setting Hierarchy
Festival Requires pass reservations for all physical events, but has pop-up events for which standalone tickets are being sold, but passholder registration is not required.
Event Bucket Setting: Advance Reservation Required.
Event Setting: Advance Reservation is not Required.
Festival passholders have walk-up access to all physical events except for one super exclusive screening that will require passholders to reserve a ticket.
Event Bucket Setting: Advance Reservation is not Required.
Event Setting: Advance Reservation is Required.
Festival passholders have walk-up access to all physical events except for one super exclusive physical event that will require passholders to reserve a ticket. VIP passholders, sponsors and filmmakers are exempt from the requirement to reserve tickets to the super exclusive physical event.
Event Bucket Setting: Advance Reservation is not Required.
Event Setting: Advance Reservation is Required.
Pass Bucket Setting: Advance Reservation is not required for VIP Pass, Sponsor Pass and Filmmaker Pass. All other passes are set to use the default event bucket setting.
Most Festival passes require reservations for all physical events, except for VIP passholders.
Event Bucket Setting: Advance Reservation Required.
Event Setting: Use Default Event Bucket Setting.
Pass Bucket Setting: Advance Reservation is not required for VIP Pass.
Instant Tickets
Instant Tickets give passholders the option to either reserve tickets online in advance or allow them to walk up to the door and get scanned in with no reservation required.
Instant Tickets are automatically generated when scanning passes with the Eventive Scanner in the following situations:
When the requirement for Advance Reservations is disabled on the Event Bucket, Physical Event or the Pass Bucket. This allows you to selectively use Instant Tickets on a per-event basis.
The pass applies to the event, via a pass rule.
The pass has not already been used to order a ticket to the event. If the pass has already reserved a ticket, scanning this pass will mark the existing ticket as scanned, not create a new one.
There is available capacity in the ticket bucket. If the ticket bucket is sold out, and there is space available in the venue, use RUSH LINE mode to scan passses for automatic oversell.
The Importance of Tickets
Tickets serve a few important functions, but most importantly they are statistically Important to your festival. Passholder tickets are tracked in the Pass Ticket Analytics and Pass Sales Analytics reports. Depending on how you’ve designed your passes and created your pass buckets, the analytics in this report can give you important insights into pass use patterns and user behaviors. Knowing key indicators of how your customers use their passes and memberships, such as average uses per pass type and attendance to each event by pass type, can help you determine if the pass related perks that you’ve created are over or underutilized and can help you create value that is targeted to the users of each pass type.
A ticket is also required if you plan to use Online Balloting for Physical Events. In order to use Online Balloting for Physical Events, audience members must have a ticket in order to cast a vote. The ticket can be either a ticket reserved in advance, or an instant ticket issued by the scanner, but the ticket must be connected to the customer’s profile for the customer to have access to the ballot.
Handling Ticket Allocations
Whether your festival requires Advance Reservations or provides Walk-up Admission for Passholders using Instant Tickets, to guarantee a specific number of tickets are allocated for passholders only, you might consider creating one or more Pass Restricted Ticket Buckets.