Timed Ticketing - General Admission Post Covid-19 Closure

Scot Sedley

Hi all,


I'm looking for some advice here on setting up a general admission program for limited capacity "timed ticketing" in the event that we are faced with limited capacity public gatherings as the country works it's way back to normal (hopefully) after the closures so many of us have faced with due to the Coronavirus outbreak.


We currently do not offer general admission advance sales through our website as our "daily admission" General Admission program is set up as a rolling program. This meaning if we are to activate it for webforms you do not see it linked to a specific date, let alone a specific time (I hope I am explaining this clearly).


Would we then need to build a new general admission program that is tied to each day, with multiple times and capacities set for each day, if we needed to alter our business to the limited capacity model I mentioned above? I'm sure others may have had to do this for specific exhibit openings or other events, I am just a bit unfamiliar with how that set-up would look.


Can anyone share a model for how their institution has done this, or maybe a knowledgebase or how-to article?


Thank you!

Tony Millet

Hello Scot-


What we do at the Natural History Museum of Utah is we use a scheduled program event as our regular museum admission. We don't use Altru's "general admission" function at all. We create program events hourly throughout the day*, and we set the hourly capacity based on how many people we want in the building at any given time. We have done several stay-time studies over the years and since we know that our average stay time is two hours we can structure our estimate of how many people are in the building at any moment around that. We haven't gotten to the point yet of considering reducing our momentary capacity when we reopen, but it would be as easy as just changing the capacity of the scheduled program events.



* We don't create these events on the fly, we create an entire year's worth all at once using the recurrence functions. 

Scot Sedley

Tony Millet:

Hello Scot-


What we do at the Natural History Museum of Utah is we use a scheduled program event as our regular museum admission. We don't use Altru's "general admission" function at all. We create program events hourly throughout the day*, and we set the hourly capacity based on how many people we want in the building at any given time. We have done several stay-time studies over the years and since we know that our average stay time is two hours we can structure our estimate of how many people are in the building at any moment around that. We haven't gotten to the point yet of considering reducing our momentary capacity when we reopen, but it would be as easy as just changing the capacity of the scheduled program events.



* We don't create these events on the fly, we create an entire year's worth all at once using the recurrence functions. 

This is great and super helpful Tony. This is exactly what I was looking for. I might have some follow up questions for you in terms of queries and reporting down the line, but as a start this is super helpful. Thank you!