Social Distance Maps using Automatic Holds

Automatic social distance holds has been a feature of Theatre Manager for quite a while - primarily for use for dinner theatres and ADA seating. You may even be using this feature on some of your maps.
NOTE: If you have permanent house helds (eg for light board), DO NOT set social distance seats for permanent holds. Instead, set the rest of your social distance seating as if those seats never existed. If you want to make permanent holds look like they are blocked online, set the hold letter to 'q'.

In the context of social distance sales and COVID19, you can create an empty seat barrier around each seat. If you do:

  • when seats are bought online and/or sold at the box office or over the phone,
  • theatre manager will put a social distance ring of held seats around the seats that were sold.

 

Implementing Automatic Social Distance Sales

The following is a recommended process for doing social distance seating:

  1. Select and edit a venue you want to implement social distancing for
  2. Select the pricing map that you currently use and right-Click to duplicate it
  3. After duplicating the pricing map:
    • edit the pricing map and:
      • Change the internal name of the map to indicate it is for social distancing. eg you might change it from

        My Main Venue to something indicator to the patrons like My Main Venue with automatic social distance

      • Alter any price codes if you want to offer fewer
    • Click on the Graphic Map tab and
      • Click on the Social button - make all the social distance seat holds as per the instructions in the link
      • Click on the Entry button - and select seats to assign a zone to (as per the instructions in the link)
    • On the description tab, a very important feature of the automatic method is to set the reporting capacity. It should be set to limit the total overall seats sold for a performance to meet governmental limits while ignore social distance holds.

      For example: this lets you set an absolute limit of 100 sold seats in a venue, regardless of how many social distance seats are required to make that happen.

  4. Edit your ticket face and add the zone number to the ticket face in some prominent way
  5. Find the events in the future and change the pricing map to the new one you just edited
  6. Add some performance notes similar per the image below to give the patrons some assurance, or customize your ticket event list to indicate that the performance is sold with social distance in mind.

 

What does the Social Distance Map look like online?

There are two icons, one for each of

  • sold seats (or manual holds by box office) - the person in the seat
  • social distance hold seats - a 'do not use' icon representing the socially held seats which will be shown as a 'q' in the box office.
Both of these icons can be changed from the default by editing a web page.