Reservation Date Default
Westport Town Hall
Hi All,
I was wondering would it possible to change the default date of a Reservation expiry to the date of the actual performance rather than the current date. I have found on numerous occasions where a staff member had forgotten to change the date of the reservation or in fact put the right date but wrong month in and as the performance date arrives the customer comes in to pay for their seats only to find the reservation has expired. This situation has happened on a few occasions and during a sold out show it leaves us in a very tough situation.
Regards,
Paul Dunning
Westport Town Hall Theatre
3
Comments
Hi Paul,
As Deborah has mentioned above, subscribing to the expiring order emails is a good way of keeping track of reservations. You can also change how reservations behave for your venue, as follows:
In General Settings, if you search under the term "reap" you will see two settings:
1. "reservations - should_only_reap_reserved_orders_with_all_events_in_past" - a check in the box here will mean that reservations do not expire until after the event has taken place
2. "reservations - should_reap_reserved_orders" - if the box is unchecked, it means that reservations do not expire at all
Both of these settings override the expiry date set, although the expiring order emails are still sent.
Hopefully you can find a combination of the above which works for you!
Thanks to Deborah and James for their input - it is interesting to hear how other organisations work with reservations :)
All the best,
Helen
Ticketsolve
Hi Paul,
Have you signed up to receive expiring reserved order emails ( Expiring reserved orders Alert for account/orders/expiring), I use this to check any reservations due to expiry and amend if needed, it is quite useful if the wrong date has been set as you can then amend or chase up the payment. The default to the performance date would not work for me as we quite often set a time limit on reservations and so this would then be the opposite .
Hi Deborah,
Yes we receive the emails on expiring orders which can help. The only problem is that sometimes emails are received when either the box office is closed or I'm not at the desk. They are opened, looked at and forgotten. I just think changing the default date means the order wont expire. I understand alot of venues set time limits but you would still be able to do that its just in reverse. Another more advanced option might be for Ticketsolve to allow venues to set their own default date in General Settings.
Paul
Hi all,
I think there maybe needs to be a venue by venue solution to this so the general settings way forward might be a good one.
We get round reservation issues by not offering them to the general public. We offer them for certain school groups/educational visits etc. and to combat how this works with venue staff it is down to one designated person responsible to authorise and keep on top of reservations.
I appreciate that this isn't possible in all venues and we have a small team, but this is a solution that does work for us with the current system.
Best,
James
Hi Helen,
That's good to know about the 'Reap' setting, that will certainly solve the issue of expiring reserved orders. I wonder could the development team look at the idea of building a feature in General Settings where as each venue can decide when a reservation expires similar to the "online_sales_guard_time" setting?
James, we rely heavily on community support so reservations are a massive plus for us! We do end up having to ring people in the days leading up to an event to double check if they are still coming and on a Sold Out event we normally require payment before the gig to ensure there's nobody who just doesn't bother turning up for whatever reason.
Regards,
Paul Dunning
Westport Town Hall Theatre
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