Ticket pools are a way to tie the availability of different ticket types together. For example, if you had two ticket types, both with 15 tickets available every 30 minutes between 8am-5pm, and they were both assigned to the same ticket pool, no more than 15 tickets total between those two ticket types would be available at each start time. So, if someone booked 3 tickets from ticket type A at 8am, and someone else went to book ticket type B also at 8am on the same day, only 7 tickets would show as available at that time even though no ticket of ticket type B had been booked yet.
Ticket pools can also be used to set an overall capacity or a "fire marshal capacity" for all ticket types in that pool. This is optional but can be a very useful tool. For example, if you have an adventure park where you know you can never have more than 200 people in the trees at one time, you can set your ticket pool capacity to 200, and then, regardless of the availability you set for the ticket types that are part of that pool, the system won't allow you to have more than 200 tickets overlapping in the trees at any given point in time (although this can be overridden on the backend). Flybook does this by throttling the available tickets per start time to less than what you've set your ticket availability at certain times to ensure you don't go over your ticket pool capacity.
Even if you only have one ticket type or you aren't concerned with setting a ticket pool capacity a ticket pool is still required.
Important: This setting will limit bookings on the FE based on this max. Back-end bookings can exceed max but the system will show warnings. This function looks at ticket duration times in the pool and adjusts the availability of other start times both before and after to maintain the pool maximum.
Follow the steps below to set up and create a new ticket pool.
- Go to Setup
- Next, under Tools for Offerings, you're going to select Ticket Pools
- Click Add New, name your ticket pool, and click Create
- If you don't have any desire to set a ticket pool capacity you are all done creating your ticket pool.
If you do want to set a ticket pool capacity, select your ticket pool name from the list of ticket pools. - Enter what you'd like the ticket pool capacity to be and click Save.
Your ticket pool setup is now complete.
Example below of how intentionally overbooking one start time on the backend will throttle availability for the surrounding start times.
Backend view: 1pm was intentionally overbooked. The ticket pool capacity is set to 200 so even though no tickets were booked in the surrounding start times, and there would normally be 15 tickets still available at each of those start times, the ticket pool capacity is throttling the availably so that there's room in the park for every one we scheduled on the backend at 1pm.
Front-end view: As you can see, those same start times that show no availability on the backend have our sold old verbiage (in this case "Call for Availability") for those unavailable start times.