How to make your TNEW seating plan look like your actual seating plan

I’ve been working with ticketing systems for twenty years, and one problem that comes up again and again is how to handle auditoriums that have curved seating banks. That’s because a lot of ticketing systems will only accept seating plans that follow strict straight lines and right angles.

Twenty years ago, this wasn’t a huge problem. The only people who ever saw the seating plan on the ticketing system were box office staff — and they could learn how the ticketing system plan matched-up with the real-life auditorium as part of their training. But now, when any online ticket buyer expects to be able to pick their own seat from a plan, it introduces a lot of challenges.

Sometimes people buy tickets expecting to be facing the stage dead-on, only to arrive and find they’re sitting at an angle. For some venues, the problems are even more extreme. Our client Bournemouth Pavilion has such an extreme curve to their theatre's seating bank that parts of the auditorium are set up on Tessitura at right angles to the stage.

As a result, they often had customers thinking they’d bought adjacent seats in a row – only to arrive at their seats to find that they were sat one behind the other. Not a great customer experience. And not a great operational experience for staff either. ('Straight Line Crazy' isn’t just a David Hare play anymore!)

So, the ticketing team challenged us to make the online booking experience better.

Budget versus results

The curved seating plan problem is one that other agencies have tackled by creating stand-alone platforms. These platforms have all kinds of additional features and complex functionality. They also come with both setup fees and ongoing license fees. But the Pavilion Theatre team didn’t want or need those features – or the associated ongoing costs.

They just wanted the TNEW seating map to look like the actual seating map!

It’s also worth mentioning that the TNEW seating map itself already has a lot of great features: it’s responsive, it's accessible, and it incorporates a lot of other information from within Tessitura when you click or hover over a seat.

So we wanted to make sure the Pavilion Theatre didn’t lose any of that helpful functionality, and we didn’t want them to have to pay for us to reinvent the wheel. All we really needed to do was take that existing seating plan and make it look a little different.

Keeping it simple!

Luckily, websites already have a powerful built-in technology that’s specifically designed for making things look a little different: Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS.

In fact, when you set up a TNEW site, you’re already using CSS to make it match the look and feel of your main website. So we needed to find a way to add to that existing CSS – to make it do more.

The solution we’ve created is very simple: we compare where the seats currently are on TNEW, and where they are on the real seating plan. Then, to mirror the actual auditorium layout, we use CSS to tell the page how much each seat needs to move along the X and Y axes. (Just like when you were in primary school and plotting points on a graph!)

After that, we hide the default TNEW row labels (because they no longer match up with the seats), and replace them with our own, nicely drawn graphic. As well as row labels, the graphic also includes other things like exits, steps, wheelchair rows and, of course, the stage.

Bournemouth Pavilion Theatre's TNEW seating plan now looks almost exactly like the PDF that the box office team had been using as a back-up, to explain the seating layout to confused customers.

Our simple, elegant solution didn’t require any other changes to the TNEW purchase path and, importantly, there are no ongoing license fees.

Plus – because a few extra lines of CSS are a lot smaller than adding a whole new platform – the environmental footprint of this solution is much smaller too. Win, win, win!

Next steps

Bournemouth Pavilion is one of the venues run by operator, BH Live. We’re currently using the Pavilion Theatre as a test-bed for our approach – to see how customers respond to it in the real world, and make any tweaks required based on user feedback. But we’re already talking to BH Live about rolling-out curved seating to all their Tessitura venues.

Now we’ve done the hard work of figuring out the approach, we’re confident that we can add it to other BH Live websites much quicker – and for an even lower, one-off cost. And we're confident that our approach will work for other venues too.

Keen to talk about how we help organisations make the most of Tessitura and TNEW? Email andrew.ladd@supercooldesign.co.uk