Capacity Managed Admissions

Beth Sherden

How are those of you who manage museums and other public attractions, planning for re-opening around capacity management?  RSVP only for a fixed number of admissions within a scheduled time frame?  Online sales only?  Different hours for member visits vs. general admission visitors?  Thoughts on how to set up in Altru to help manage?

Crystal Bruce

Discussion moved to Altru Community. Thanks!

Juli Atherton

We are looking at how to manage this as well.  It would be helpful to allow a capacity number that reflects what we can safely serve.  However we offer different discounts that we would still like to offer.  Specifically, we are part of the Museums For All program and we don't want to burden families that depend on this discount especially at this time.  I would like to know more about how we can set this up in our online sales.


Would love to hear ideas from others.

Jen Lomeli

We are also looking into this for re-opening. I was just in Discussions looking at topics on timed entry ticketing options, there are a couple older posts but would like to see some solutions that are being used more recently. If this can also be tied to our website ticketing too so we can be paperless and "touchless" for ticketing that would be awesome! 

Christina Beargie

Juli Atherton:

We are looking at how to manage this as well.  It would be helpful to allow a capacity number that reflects what we can safely serve.  However we offer different discounts that we would still like to offer.  Specifically, we are part of the Museums For All program and we don't want to burden families that depend on this discount especially at this time.  I would like to know more about how we can set this up in our online sales.


Would love to hear ideas from others.

This is a really good point- we are still in process of implementing Museums for All (it was going to launch in April), but have other discounts and access programs also. We are talking about ticketing strategies and while we can move our member discount online fairly easily, some of these others are more of a challenge (we apply them manually in daily sales), and I hadn't thought of it before your post! My gut is that we would probably make those available by discount codes that we share widely, and assume good faith for their use. Discount fraud is much lower than we "think" it is, and people genuinely want to support their community orgs right now. I think I'll bring this up at our next reopening strategy meeting.

Juli Atherton

Museums For All is such a wonderful program for families that may not be able to visit us otherwise.  Good luck to you on your roll out.


We have talked about offering discounts and asking that those that purchase on line to bring appropriate ID (Military ID, etc.) to avoid additional charges at arrival.

Heather Thorwald

We're in the early stages of planning for reopening and managing capacity.  Right now, I'm thinking we will sell Scheduled Program Events for specific visitation time slots, online only. Then we can restrict capacity and avoid having to run credit cards or exchange money at the front desk.  We would publicize a discount code to our members -- although Altru web sales supports member log-ins, I don't want to make our members have to deal with registering on our website right now.  


We may need to hold out some slots for families that don't have Internet access and need to reserve via phone, which we'd have to enter manually.  We'll have to look further at those logistics.


Regarding Museums for All, we offer heavily discounted ($10) annual memberships rather than daily admission discounts, so we've verified eligibility for those members already.  Maybe you could preregister Museums for All participants online or via text (they could snap a photo of their benefits card), then give them a special discount code to use online.  I agree with Christina that we don't need to worry too much about discount codes being abused -- I'd rather err on the side of compassion right now.



 

Breanne Leach

We have pulled online sales entirely to manage capacity at the door. While it isn't touchless pay, this also gives us more freedom to make short-term decision changes (if stay at home gets re-implemented, if we need to monitor face coverings, etc... then no one has purchased yet). We won't have to worry about refunds or people showing up and we are already at capacity.


We've always sold our General Admission as a scheduled program, but we'll likely add timed ticketing (instead of one all day event) as well. We're meeting to discuss tomorrow the benefits and drawbacks of timed ticketing vs. clicker counting.


Are other museums planning to close between time slots if that's how you're planning to manage capacity? Or are you just using your best estimate for average length of visit and setting your capacity per time slot accordingly? How are you tracking schools with your capacity? Ours are tracked in a separate program, but as they're still bodies in the building, we need to figure out how to manage overall capacity (assuming schools are back in session in the fall and going on field trips of course).