Setting Up Redemptions

A voucher type just specifies how much a ticket costs and who is allowed to buy it; it doesn’t specify what performances it’s valid for, or what the sales period is for that type of ticket for that performance. That information is carried in a redemption. A redemption associates one particular voucher type with one performance for which that type of voucher can be used, and possibly specifies start and end sales dates, capacity controls, and a promotion code that must be specified by the patron in order for the ticket option to appear.

To set up redemptions for a show, click on the Season tab, click on the show name, and then click the “Add/Change Ticket Redemptions” button. On the redemptions page, select one or more voucher types and one or more performances. When you click the Apply Changes button, redemptions will be created so that all of the voucher types you selected will be valid for all of the performances you selected. You may create as many redemptions as you wish; there are no limits on how many different voucher types are valid at a performance, or how many different performances one voucher type may be valid for.

You can also specify capacity controls, so that certain voucher types (for example, discount tickets) are quantity-limited per performance, and promo codes that patrons can type in to reveal voucher types at special prices.

Redemptions also have a sales window. By default a voucher type will be available for purchase as soon as you create the redemption, and sales will stop at a default time relative to the performance start time that you specify on the Options tab (such as “60 minutes before the performance starts”).

The redemptions page is used to both create new redemptions and change existing redemptions. When you click the Apply Changes button, the system will create the specified redemptions if they do not already exist. If a redemption is already present and you try to add it again on the redemptions page, the system will either apply your changes to the existing redemption or leave the existing redemption as-is. Which approach the system uses will depend on whether the “Keep as-is on existing redemptions” checkbox is checked or not.

To see what redemptions have already been created for a show, click the Season tab, then click the show name, and then click the Expand All button at the top of the list of performances. You will now see a list of redemptions for each performance. You may click on an individual redemption to edit its capacity controls, promo code, or sales window. (The “Add/Change Ticket Redemptions” button will be much easier if you need to edit the same redemption for multiple performances.)

You can also click on the X to the right of an individual redemption in order to delete it. Note that you cannot delete a redemption from a performance if any vouchers of the type specified in the redemption have already been sold for that performance. However, you can prevent further sales of that voucher type for that performance by adjusting the “max sales” on the redemption to zero.

Redemptions Example for Single Tickets

Suppose we will have a run of the play Hamlet every Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon January 5-21, 2024 (nine performances), and we have a house capacity of 100 with general admission (no reserved seats). Our general admission price is $40 for adults and $25 for youths, but we also want to do promotions to sell more seats at matinees. We might set up voucher types and redemptions as follows:

Voucher Type and Price Redemption
Adult General, $40 All performances; unlimited sales; advance sales stop 3 hours before performance
Youth General, $25 All performances; unlimited sales; advance sales stop 3 hours before performance
Matinee Special, $20 Sunday performances only; sales limited to 30 per show; advance sales stop 2 days before performance

This way, even if the matinee special is really popular, at most 30 discounted tickets will be sold for each matinee.

When a customer is on the “Buy Tickets” page and selects a particular performance, only the voucher types whose redemptions allow that performance will be shown. So, for example, if there were seats available for the Sunday January 7 matinee but all 30 Matinee Special seats had been sold, the patron could still buy Adult General or Youth General seats for that performance, but not Matinee Special seats. The same would happen if there were still Matinee Special seats left but the show was less than two days away, since the Matinee Special redemption says that sales of those tickets must stop two days before the performance.

Promotions

Since you can create many different voucher types at different price points, it is easy to offer many different kinds of promotions. For example, you can create discounted tickets that you will make available to specific communities, or discounted tickets for large groups. You can set the Availability field on these voucher types to “Box office use only” instead of the typical “Anyone may purchase” in order to make sure that all sales of these special tickets are handled by the box office and therefore only the appropriate people get to take advantage of the promotion.

Audience1st also offers tools so that patrons can avail themselves of promotions without having to make their purchase through the box office. You can set up discounted tickets for a performance that do not become available for purchase until the buyer enters a specific discount code. See this page for how to work with discount codes.

You can also specify that a buyer must purchase a minimum and/or a maximum number of a specific type of ticket in one transaction. This makes it easy to set up group discounts, BOGOs, and other promotions that patrons can purchase themselves without assistance from the box office. See this page to learn more about setting up these kinds of promotions.

Redemptions Example for Subscriptions

A simple subscription might be “one ticket to each of our three shows this season” (let’s say Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear). To sell this subscription, you’ll create a voucher type corresponding to a subscriber reservation for each of the three shows. The Hamlet subscriber voucher type would be valid for any performance of Hamlet, but not for any other production; and so on.

You can also create bundles that are more restrictive. For example, a “matinees only” subscription would require creating three more voucher types whose redemptions would indicate they’re only valid for matinees. The redemptions for the six vouchers in this scenario might then be:

Voucher Type and Price Redemption
“Hamlet” – subscriber All performances of Hamlet; unlimited sales
“Hamlet” – subscriber – Matinees only Matinee performances of Hamlet; unlimited sales
“Othello” – subscriber All performances of Othello; unlimited sales
“Othello” – subscriber – Matinees only Matinee performances of Othello; unlimited sales
“King Lear” – subscriber All performances of King Lear; unlimited sales
“King Lear” – subscriber – Matinees only Matinee performances of King Lear; unlimited sales
Regular Subscription – $100 Contains one each of “Hamlet – subscriber”, “Othello – subscriber”, and “King Lear – subscriber”
Matinee-Only Subscription – $75 Contains one each of “Hamlet – subscriber – Matinees only”, “Othello – subscriber – Matinees only”, and “King Lear – subscriber -Matinees only”

If your subscription is more like a flex pass,  three tickets valid for any performance of any regular production, then you might create just a single “Subscriber ticket” voucher type and add redemptions to make it valid for any performance of any show. The subscription voucher type in this scenario would be a bundle containing three “Subscriber ticket” vouchers.