Browse docs

Venues and seat maps

Draw a venue once and reuse it for every show: rows, aisles, price bands, accessible and restricted-view seats, and why editing a venue never touches a show already on sale.

A venue is a saved seat map. You draw it once and use it for every performance in that space, so setting up next year's show takes minutes rather than an evening.

Building the map

The seat map builder works in rows. For each row you set the number of seats, add aisles where the gaps are, and assign a price band. Price bands are how you charge different amounts for different parts of the house (Stalls, Circle, Restricted view); the actual prices are set per performance, so the same map can be £12 for the school play and £25 for the professional touring show.

You can also:

Block seats that are not for sale (the lighting desk, house seats, a broken chair).
Mark seats accessible or restricted-view in bulk by giving a range, for example A1 to A3. Buyers see these markers on the map and in the seat list.
Preview live as you build, so the map looks the way it will to buyers before you save.

General admission venues

Not every event has seats. For a general admission event you skip the map and give the performance a capacity instead. Buyers choose a quantity, and the plugin stops selling when the capacity is reached. Checkout, tickets and check-in all work the same way.

Editing a venue that is already in use

Each performance sells against its own snapshot of the venue taken when the performance was created. Editing the venue later, whether to add a row or fix a price band, does not change any performance already on sale. New performances pick up the new layout.

This is deliberate: it means you can never accidentally sell a seat that has just been removed, or move a buyer's seat out from under them.

Reserved and general admission in the same event

Each performance is one or the other, but an event can mix them across performances: a seated gala night on Friday and a general admission matinee on Saturday, say.

Bigger maps

If your venue has curved rows, tables or zones rather than straight rows, the drag-and-drop seat designer in Box Office Pro handles those. The free builder covers any straight-row layout.