Venue Capacity and Ticket Inventory: The Chicken or The Egg?

While we may never know whether the chicken or the egg came first we do know which one comes first in ticketing. Determining the number of tickets you have available is based on your venue capacity. If you’re renting your space, the venue manager or event coordinator should be able to tell you what the room/space can hold. If you’re having to figure this out yourself, The Special Event Guru did a great post about how to decide your capacity based on your configuration and room size.

When you are entering your venue in the Freshtix Event Wizard you will be asked to enter its capacity.

The thing you need to remember about venue capacity is that no one else will be able to buy a ticket once venue capacity is reached. So if you are purposefully over-selling an event for some reason, such as a free movie screening, your venue capacity needs to reflect that.

“But I have multiple ticket types!” you’re shouting. Not a problem. Here’s how we do that.

If you have two or more ticket types you can still only sell as many tickets as specified by the venue capacity. For this event the organizer has three ticket types; Adult, Child, and Student. These can be sold in any combination until venue capacity is reached. Above you’ll see the venue holds 500. So you need to have 500 of each ticket type available. Your set up on Freshtix will look like this:

But what if you have multiple ticket types but some of them are limited quantity? Don’t worry, we’re really good at handling complicated situations.  You want to do a special VIP ticket for only 100 of your guests? It is still the same concept. You want your tickets sold in whatever combination fills up the venue. That means if for some strange reason you could only sell 50 VIP tickets you want to be able to make up the difference with your regular tickets. Your set up would look like this:

Remember, your venue capacity determines your available tickets. Once capacity is hit, ticket sales will end.

Pro Tip: If you do multiple events at the same venue that vary in size, set your venue up for maximum capacity. That way when you set up a larger event and select that same venue you won’t have an issue with ticket sales stopping before capacity is reached.

A summary of this post can be found in the Freshtix Support Hub.