Group Booking Mode

Under some circumstances, you may find that when creating orders with a large number of tickets, the basket quickly becomes busy and harder to make sense of as each ticket creates a new line within the order. You can, if you would prefer, turn on Group Booking Mode. This groups tickets of the same type together in the basket, although you can also mix and match in the same order, and add some tickets using Group Booking Mode and others as individual lines. In this article we’re going to talk you through how to enable and use this tool, and explain what the implications are of using it.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

• Enabling Group Booking Mode
• Using Group Booking Mode
  • Adding tickets to the basket
  • How the basket looks
  • Editing the basket
  • Confirming the order
  • Editing orders
    • Grouping and ungrouping orders

Enabling Group Booking Mode

You can turn Group Booking Mode on or off in the Settings Interface. The following instructions refer to the new UI in Settings, so please make sure you have this turned on if you would like to use this guide.

NOTE: you will need the Settings Administrator user role on your Spektrix account to be able to enable or disable this setting. See this article for more information on user roles and permissions.

If you don’t have the new UI enabled, click on the Control Panel icon in the bottom-left corner of the screen and select the Go to new interface option.

• Go to Configuration > System Setup > Basket/Cart.
• Select Enabled Group Booking Mode.
• In the Number of tickets to prompt for box, enter the minimum number of tickets that you want the system to treat as a group. We’ll refer to this later on as the threshold for group bookings.
• Users will then be asked if they would like to add tickets as a group if they add this number of tickets (or more) to the basket in one go.

Using Group Booking Mode

If you have Group Booking Mode turned on, it’s a very intuitive process. There are, however, a few things you should be aware of when using this, so please read through the following steps to make sure you understand what the implications are.

Adding tickets to the basket
As with Offers, if you have Group Booking Mode activated, Spektrix will automatically look to apply it any time you make an order with enough tickets to pass the group size threshold you’ve chosen.

Any time you add that number or more of tickets to the basket, on either a reserved or an unreserved seating plan, you will see the following prompt:

• If you select No, the tickets will be added to the basket as normal, creating one line per ticket.
• If you select Yes, the tickets will instead be grouped together into one line (or sometimes multiple lines, based on various criteria. See How does it look? Section for more on this)

You can also choose to add tickets to the basket in a group before you even select them, by using the options just beneath the seating plan:

• The default is to add tickets as single line items, which means that you will see the group booking prompt if you add enough tickets to the basket to pass the group threshold.
• If you choose to add tickets as a group then, regardless of the number you select, they will be grouped by ticket type in the basket - even if you choose a number below the threshold.
• If you choose this option, you won’t see the group booking prompt.

Remember that you can use a combination of single line items and groups if you need to.

How the basket looks
Here’s an example of a basket where everything is grouped into a single line:

You might also see tickets grouped by one or more other criteria, from the list below:

• Ticket Type  
• Commissions (charged or waived)  
• Reservation or Purchase  
• Ticket attributes  
• Price (including different groups for price overridden tickets)  
• Whether an offer has been applied  
• Whether the ticket has been printed or not (in the Order screen)

Here’s an example of a basket which has been grouped into two lines, by Ticket Type:

Here’s a completed Order where five tickets out of fifteen have been printed, so it’s grouped into two lines based on which of the tickets were printed:

Editing the basket
If you have tickets grouped together in the basket, you can still edit individual tickets if you need to make changes to your selection. There are different ways you can do this, depending on what you’re trying to achieve, but it’s important to be aware that they also have different implications.

Within the basket
If you want to change the Ticket Type of one or more tickets in a group, or make any changes using the Reserve drop-down (i.e. make overrides, add Ticket Attributes, charge or waive commission, etc.) and you don’t mind which tickets you do this to, then you’re usually best off doing this from within the basket. You can use any of these functions, and Spektrix will prompt you to state how many tickets in the group you would like to apply the changes to.

This will default to the full number of tickets in the selected group, but you can amend it to be whatever number you need. If the change you make results in there being tickets of different types in the basket (i.e. most changes except deleting tickets) then you will subsequently see a new line, grouping together the new type of tickets.

On the seating plan
If you want to remove or amend specific seats, you can do this directly from the seating plan.

In the same way as you can when not using Group Booking Mode, if you want to remove one or more tickets from a group you can just deselect the relevant seats and click the Update basket button. This will remove those tickets from the appropriate group in the basket.

If you want to edit specific seats, you can right-click on each relevant seat in the seating plan to see a menu of available choices. You can’t change the Ticket Type here - you need to do that from within the basket - but you can reserve, delete, override, waive commission and add Ticket Attributes.

As you might expect, if you make any changes here, the basket will then update to show the tickets grouped by Ticket Type or other property on multiple lines.

Confirming the order
Once everything is in the basket as you’d like it to be, you can then go ahead and pay for then confirm the order as you normally would. Nothing changes at the confirmation stage if you have tickets grouped in the basket.

Note: there are a couple of important points to be aware of when using Group Booking Mode:

Once tickets are added to the basket, you can’t switch them from single to grouped without deleting the tickets and re-adding them.

• You can use Group Booking Mode for any number of tickets. Any tickets sold in Group Mode will always be treated as a group booking, even if you only use it to sell a couple of seats.

Editing orders
Once an order where Group Booking has been used has been confirmed, you can still go back and edit it – when editing, you can either leave it grouped, which makes the editing process slightly different to normal, or you can ungroup it if that’s easier.

Grouping or ungrouping an order
When viewing an order in the Sales Interface, as long as you have Group Booking Mode enabled on your system you’ll see an option labelled either Ungroup tickets (if the order has been grouped) or Group tickets (if the order uses single items):

You can toggle an order between grouped and ungrouped mode using this option – you don’t need to select the tickets, just click the button. When you select this option, you’ll see a pop-up prompt asking you to confirm that you want to make the change from one mode to the other:

If you ungroup an order, it becomes a standard single-item order in every respect and editing it will be exactly the same as normal.

Editing a grouped order
The main difference between editing a grouped order and a single item order is that when you select the drop-down list of actions from within the order, you'll see an Edit order option instead of separate Return and Buy options.

All tickets in the order will be added back into the basket. You can then edit the order by selecting the tickets in the Items section of the basket and changing their properties, in the same way as you would when selling tickets for the first time.

The same principles apply as when you’re editing the basket, so be aware of which method you use to edit the order, and that if you make changes to groups of tickets you should double check exactly what’s been changed.

If you need certain seats to be a particular Ticket Type, you can always remove them from the group (by unselecting the seat on the seating plan and clicking Update Basket) and then re-adding them using single line mode. 

You can then amend the Ticket Type on those specific seats.

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If you have any further questions about Group Booking Mode, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Spektrix Support team.