Seats can be paired to allow automatic seat assignment of the pair. One of the seat is the main seat, e.g., a wheelchair seat, and the other is the companion seats, e.g., for the wheelchair companion. Limitation: This feature works only in automatic seat assignment, not with "choice on seatmap".
Automatic seat assignment, in particular in the context of the seating module, is extremely useful when managing large competitions with large venues. However, in the context of wheelchairs or easy access seats, the companion seat is not necessarily a contiguous seat, so seat assignment had to be done manually to ensure correctly paired seats were assigned.
Solution
This new feature allows you to configure paired seat categories, which in turn allows you to easily define paired seats in the seat map. With the configuration in place, the system is capable of automatically assigning correctly paired seats, even if they are not contiguous.
Getting started
Logical seat category pairing
When configuring the parent seat category, e.g., wheelchair, assign the companion seat category from the Companion seat category drop-down, e.g., Wheelchair companion. The companion seat category should have already been created to appear in the drop-down.
Note that companion seat category may be technically linked to more than one "parent" seat category. However, if possible, we recommend sticking to a 1-1 pairing.
Seat pairing
In the seat map plan, when assigning a companion seat category to a seat, the system will display in the pop-up toolbox a new "Companion of" seat attribute. Upon saving the map, this field must be field for all the seats assigned to a companion seat category.
Seats already assigned to a companion seat will appear in grey at the bottom of the list and neighbor seats will be display in yellow. Seats can only be paired 1-1. This means that when assigning a seat that was already assigned to another seat, the system will automatically unlink the first one.
Seat pairing can be modified at the performance/match level, i.e., in the sales configuration map.
Sales
Congratulations! You are ready to sell your paired seats online, at the box-office, both with automatic seat assignment, and use the automatic seating of the seating module. Note that it is possible to allow selecting seats manually from the map. However the system will check when closing the order that the selected seats are correctly paired. The check only ensures that companion seats are not alone but the main seat can be sold alone.
In the box-office, an operator right can be granted to bypass this check and close the order even if some companion seats are alone in the cart, i.e., that the paired has not been selected.
