Seating Plans are essential to Event Set Up in Spektrix. Every Event you set up will need a Seating Plan to be able to sell tickets.
Reserved Seating Plans allow your customers to choose a specific seat where they want to sit, while Unreserved Seating Plans are for Events without allocated seats. You can also have multi-area Seating Plans which have both Reserved and Unreserved Areas.
Seating Plans can also be used to provide all sorts of useful details about accessibility, restricted views, leg room or any other information you want your customers to be aware of.
VIDEO: If you're new to Seating Plans, take a look at our Seating concept video.
Venues
Some organisations manage all events within a single building, however, we know that there are others that run events across multiple sites. Setting up Venues allows you to group Seating Plans based on which Venue they belong to and inform customers about the Venue during the booking process.
It’s possible to have multiple performance spaces within one Venue and each performance space may have multiple Seating Plans for different formations. For example, thrust formation or in the round.
Read our Support Centre article for more information on How to Set Up Venues.
Reserved and Unreserved
Seating Plans generally can be split into two different groups: reserved and unreserved Seating Plans. However, you can also have multi-area Seating Plans which contain both reserved and unreserved areas.
A reserved Seating Plan is made up of:
The original Seating Plan: this contains all potentially available seats represented as circles.
A background image: showing the stage, the boundary between the stalls and circle and row letters.
You can create simple unreserved Seating Plans yourself, but for everything else we’ll need to build a Seating Plan for you. Whether you want a brand new Seating Plan or a change made to an existing one, let us know what you need by filling in the Seating Plan Request Form.
When creating a Seating Plan, whether it's reserved or unreserved, it is essential to make sure that it includes the maximum number of seats you could ever have available. This is because you can’t add extra seats to a Seating Plan once it has been created without requesting a new Seating Plan.
Once your Seating Plan has been created, it is not possible to change:
- The location or labelling of any reserved seats
- The location of clickable Areas
- Orientation of the Seating Plan
- Maximum capacity of any/all Seating Plan Areas
Overlays
Once you have a Seating Plan, there are various configuration options that can be achieved using Seating Plan Overlays.
Seating Plan Overlays can be used to:
- Take seats off sale
- Make aesthetic changes to the background image of a Seating Plan
- Assign Price Bands to specific areas
- Hold back an allocation of seats from general sale
- Offer additional information about specific seats
- Give customers the option of choosing the Best Available seats
There are five different types of Seating Plan Overlays in Spektrix.
- A Lock Overlay: grouping seats such as House Seats or Wheelchair spaces to be held off from general sale using Locks.
- A Layout Overlay: hiding (masking) seats, taking them entirely off sale, and applying an amended background image.
- A Price Band Overlay: assigning Price Bands to seats.
- An Info Overlay: adding extra information to certain seats.
- A Best Available Overlay: ranking seats from best to worst.
TIP: You’ll need a Layout Overlay, a Price Band Overlay and a Lock Overlay before you can create an Event and its Instances.
Access bookings
You can make Access Seats available online and flag Access information to customers using a combination of Locks and Seating Plan Overlays.
Using Tags and Lock Type Eligibility you can make it so that Access Seats can be purchased by online by eligible customers.
Info Overlays and Layout Overlays can be used to highlight Access seats and give more information about seating for Access performances.
- Online Access Booking - Making Wheelchair Seats Visible Online
- Online Access Booking - Making Other Access Seats Visible Online
How to Change the Name of Seating Plan Areas
If you need to make changes to the names of Areas on your Seating Plan you can do that by following the Support Centre article on changing Seating Plan Area names.
Before you change the name of Areas on your Seating Plan, it’s important to note that the change will be global, meaning it will take effect everywhere the Seating Plan is in use including reports on past Events.
If your old Seating Plan Area names are on your background image, then you’ll need to update this too.
View from a Seat
The View from a Seat feature allows you to attach images of the view from specific Seats in your auditorium to your Seating Plan.
During the booking process, the View from a Seat button will appear beside your Seating Plan. Clicking View from a Seat will display a version of the Seating Plan with image thumbnails over different areas which the customer can then click on to expand.
Setting up this function will require some support from your Web Developer.
Read our Support Centre article on View from a Seat to learn more.
Seat Attributes
Seat Attributes allow you to add extra internal information to individual seats. These Attributes can then be used in Reporting or Ticket Designs.
The most common use of Seat Attributes is to set a Door or Entrance Number against each seat, which is printed on the ticket to help visitors find their way on arrival.
Unlike Seating Plan Overlays, you can only have one configuration of Seat Attributes per Seating Plan.
Further reading
Now that you are more familiar with Seating Plans in Spektrix, you might want to check out our articles on: