Group Seating and Inventory Management — A NEW Approach
Say goodbye to the annoying problems group buyers cause
Everyone in the ticket sales industry knows the story…
- A group wants each member to buy their own tickets for a game or event
- They also want to sit together
- Inventory is tight and you don’t want to pre-hold large seat blocks
- The group says “this game or no game”
Dilemma. Or Opportunity?
Say hello to the Spinzo Social Group Sales Platform.
As a certified partner of Ticketmaster, Spinzo has developed a flexible and robust group ticketing and inventory management platform integrated with Ticketmaster’s Archtics System. Features can be adapted to other systems as well.
With Spinzo, you can:
- Allow individual group members to select their own seats
- Pull seats directly from open inventory without the need to pre-hold seat blocks
- Establish a target zone of one or more sections for the group (still pulling open inventory)
- Let buyers see exactly where their friends are sitting so they can choose nearby seats
- Optimize inventory because the platform will never split seat blocks
- Offer a pain free and mobile-optimized seat-selecting experience
Spinzo offers ultimate flexibility for the seller with freedom and choice for the customer.
Open inventory “target zone” — the new way to seat groups
In today’s world of group sales, you have two inventory allocation options, neither of which are optimal.
- Estimate the group size and pre-hold the seats.
This ties up inventory that may never be used — estimate and hold 100, sell 30. Not fun. - Allow the group to buy from open inventory (if your system allows it).
This scatters the group around the venue — not acceptable for many groups.
Spinzo gives you a third option which provides the best of #1 and #2 without the pitfalls!
3. Restrict group seat selection to a “target zone” of open inventory! This consolidates the group to one or more sections without having to pre-hold.
When a group member buys tickets, they will be given seating options within the “target zone” only and those seating options are pulled from open inventory. The group will generally be sitting in the same area without the need to pre-hold inventory. You have complete flexibility to expand the target zone, if needed, at any time during a promotion. Voila!
Bye Bye 400 scattered single seats
There’s nothing worse than a big pile of singles (and doubles) when you have buyers wanting to buy 2, 3, 4 or more seats. Have you ever pondered how this happens? Look no further than the traditional seat selection process. Let’s say you’re a ticket buyer, and you want 4 seats together. You look at the seat map and you see only one row with enough seats. It has up to 8 total seats available.
What do you do? If you’re like most people, you’ll pick the middle four.
Now look what’s happened. The seat block has been split into 2 tiny blocks of 2 seats each. The next person that wants 4 seats will be out of luck.
This process happens over and over again as people and groups buy seats, further dividing seat blocks until all you’re left with is tiny blocks, or singles.
There’s a better way!
With Spinzo’s seat selector, buyers don’t pick individual seats one by one — they choose from permitted seat blocks that are offered to them. To continue the example, Spinzo provides the buyer with two options:
Besides being an easier buy-process, this prevents splitting of the seat block and maintains 4 contiguous seats for the next buyer. Use this technique early on in your group or single-game ticket sales, and you’ll thank us later!
Customers want to sit near their friends? No problem.
Have you ever checked your voicemail, and discovered over 10 sit-together requests? This is a common problem in group promotions where group members are each buying their own tickets. They find out their friends and colleagues are going, and they want to sit with them! There are two reasons why sit-together requests are so common:
- Your group sales platform doesn’t allow buyers to select specific seats, so they can’t choose to sit with their friends anyway.
- Even with seat selection options, buyers don’t know where their friends are sitting without asking each and every friend.
Spinzo solves this with a convenient tool call “See Who’s Going!” While selecting seats, buyers can click or tap to see who’s purchased tickets and where they are sitting. The list is convenient, real-time, and alphabetical — perfect for many groups that want this feature. Buyers then choose their preferred seats, as close as they can get to their friends.
Best of all, you can choose whether to enable or disable the list on a group-by-group basis.
Tiny dots on a tiny screen — no thank you!
Oh the frustration — picking seats on a mobile phone — selecting a sequence of tiny dots, choosing the wrong ones, inadvertently unselecting what you just selected. It’s painful.
Some group-sales platforms are not mobile-responsive, meaning that they force buyers to pinch-to-zoom to read the text and to select seats. There are other group sales platforms which are mobile responsive, but suffer similar frustration, forcing buyers to select each and every individual seat one-by-one. Why? Mobile is supposed to be convenient, easy, and fun.
With Spinzo, it is.
Spinzo has re-imagined the concept of a seat selector, making it significantly faster and easier to participate on desktop or mobile. Customers choose the number of seats they want, then tap twice to select the seats. The first tap selects one of the available sections; The second tap chooses one of the available seat blocks. Based on the desired number of seats, Spinzo is crunching real-time inventory to determine the available sections and seat blocks. It even shows which seats are on an aisle. The system will never split a seat block in two, and will of course never leave a single.
Selecting seats has never been so easy. Choose the number of seats, then tap, tap, done.
Join the many sports teams and venues using Spinzo’s seat selection and management features.
Drop us a line: hello@spinzo.com
We’ll show you how to fill more seats with less pain.
