Configuring your time slots for private party experiences

Why?

Some experiences are meant to be shared with small groups of friends/family or individuals. By using some of our more advanced settings, you can prevent two separate groups, or individuals, from booking the same area at the same time.

What functionality are we going over?

In this guide we’ll be reviewing three settings that you should consider when setting up your experience or activity for a private party or a private booking.

How?

Within this article we’ll explain the key differences between the ticket settings;

• One customer per ticket type
• One customer per time slot
• How you can use capacity multipliers to book-out a slot for private hire

Prerequisites

Before continuing with this guide, you should have read the following:

1. Create and configure your organiser profile
2. Create an event, set up your venue and add a date
3. How to set up your first ticket

You should also be familiar with how time slots work, but there’s no need to create your time slots just yet;

4. Managing a large number of bookable time slots or dates effectively    

For capacity multipliers, you should be familiar with automatic capacity management features.

One customer per ticket type

The ‘one customer per ticket type’ has been designed for when an experience has several areas that can be utilised at the same time by different groups/private parties or individuals. Examples include bowling lanes, spa treatments, or VR rooms.

Let’s take Lane Bowling as an example. You have 5 lanes and each lane can take up to 10 people. Within your time slot, you’ll be creating 5 ticket types;

Note: For this example you should disable Automatic capacity management.

1. In ‘Tickets’, click ‘Add ticket’
2. Name your first ticket ‘Lane 1’ and set a per-person price and a capacity of 10.
3. In your ticket description, type ‘Price per-person for bowling in Lane 1’
4. Under Advanced settings, select “One customer per ticket type”
5. Under Advanced settings, consider a ‘Minimum per purchase’ and a ‘Maximum per purchase’
6. Click ‘Add Ticket’
7. Repeat steps 1-6 for Lanes 2 through 5.

From a customer perspective, they will be able to purchase up to 10 tickets of any Lane. Once the first customer has purchased their tickets the Lane is ‘sold out’. Other customers will be unable to purchase within the same Lane, keeping the experience private for the original customer.

From here, you could group the Lane tickets in a ticket group called “Bowling”, and sell upgrades such as snacks, drinks, or birthday upgrades, underneath a separate ticket group called “Add-ons”.

One customer per time slot

The ‘One customer per time slot’ is perfect for experiences where there is one area, and groups, or individuals, need to arrive at their allocated time for a private experience. Examples include an Escape Room, or a Santa’s Grotto.

The ‘one customer per time slot’ setting means that when a customer purchases any selection of tickets within a time slot or date, that whole time slot will be sold out and unavailable to other customers.

An advantage of using the ‘one customer per time slot’ setting is that you can have any number of ticket types in the time slot. For example, you can set three tickets for Adult, Child, and an Upgrade ticket. (This isn’t possible with the ‘One customer per ticket type’ setting).

Find the ‘one customer per time slot’ setting by visiting the ‘Time Slot Settings’ tile, available when you have more than one active date assigned to your event.

Using capacity multiplier for a private hire

If a space can be used for both public admission and private hire, you can take advantage of the Capacity Multiplier feature to accommodate more bookings.

1. Under “Tickets”, set the capacity for your space (eg. 50).
2. Create your first ticket type, “General Admission” and leave the capacity multiplier at 1.
3. Create your second ticket type, “Private Hire” and under “Advanced settings” set the capacity multiplier to 50.

Now, if somebody purchases the “Private Hire” ticket it will sell-out the date, or time slot, and prevent any of the “General Admission” tickets from being purchased.

Likewise, if somebody purchases any number of “General Admission” tickets first, then the capacity of the date will not be able to accommodate the 50 spaces needed for the “Private Hire” ticket - thus the “Private Hire” ticket will become unavailable. Other members of the public will be able to continue to purchase the “General Admission” ticket.