"Family Pack" or "Couple" Pricing
We sometimes get asked to setup pricing wherein a couple or family gets a discount price. First, this really isn't a recommended means of pricing tickets. Ticketing systems always price tickets per-ticket. So each ticket needs its own price. Also there's no way to tell the system what specifically constitutes a couple or family? Is a couple only 2 adults? What about an Adult and a Child? Is a family 2 adults and 3 kids? What about 2 parents, 1 grandparent and 2 kids? It's really a confusing way to try to price things, both for you and for your patrons.
There are 2 ways this can be attempted. One is using the function similar to a group discount. So if the family discount is for a family of 5 we could set up a discount associated to # of tickets = 5. This would discount all orders of 5 tickets or more to the same performance. So if your family of 5 price is advertised as $30, maybe the group price is $6 per ticket. Then each ticket on the order might appear as $6 each regardless of person type. Then if you wanted the discount to not apply for more than 5, a max number could be input as a max per order of 5. So if they had 6 people on the order, only the first 5 would get the discount.
The other way is using the BuyN feature. So if you wanted to advertise a couple as $40 per person, $70 per couple we could set up a buyN with a base price of $30. So the first ticket would be standard at $40, then the 2nd ticket would be $30. This would repeat for multiple pairs. NOTE however that if you have different person types, this gets much more complex. Since you might have a $40 adult ticket and a $20 child ticket. We would likely want to set the BuyN price term to Adult person type only.
For full details on the fields available in pricing control, see Pricing.
Member Discounting on Tickets
Price terms can be built to automatically provide a pricing discount to members. These are generally done as a negative adjustment amount (such as -$5 per ticket), or as a percentage adjustment (such as -10% per ticket).
The discount can be set up to trigger based on a membership donation amount (such as $100 total or more donated within the last 12 months), or based on specific membership levels set up on the membership setup screen.
NOTE: In the case of related household members, the system will automatically extend the membership benefits to the related household members, even if the donation was not input under their patron record. So if Don Smith made the donation(s) eligible for the member discount, related household member Sally Smith would also get the same discount.
Pay-What-You-Will / Sliding Scale
Some groups wish to have certain nights of performance designated for patrons to pay what they can. This option will most likely want to be done via your box office only. So you could have regular pricing available for online advance purchase, then have the sliding scale pricing available at the door. The two options we would recommend:
- Option 1) Using the EDIT option next to selected tickets to manually over ride pricing:
- Set up pricing for the performance as usual, then when you select tickets via box office screen use the EDIT option next to each ticket to manually input a specific price for the ticket.
- With this method each patron on the order can be priced individually.
- Option 2) Using pre-defined base prices setup with coupon codes:
- Set up a series of coupon codes that trigger pricing increments such as $1, $5, $10, etc.
- When building the patron order, ask what amount they'd like to pay for each ticket and input that coupon code to trigger all tickets to change to that price.
- This method will work in Door Sales mode since coupon codes are accepted on that screen.
- Note that using this method all tickets will be priced the same. However on box office you could then manually override individual tickets to change them to something unique as in option 1 above.