Overview
- Attaching a seating plan to an event promotes it to a seated event.
- Event seating is configured in two parts:
- Attach and sync — select a plan and import its structure (price bands and spaces) into event-specific records.
- Configure — set event-level behaviour such as seat selection mode, best available seats, and space visibility.
- Because the sync creates event-specific copies of the plan data, you can manage seat statuses, holds, and price band assignments independently per event without affecting the source plan or other events using the same plan.
Seating plans require the seating plans feature to be enabled for your
company. You need event edit or edit-relationship permissions to attach,
change, or configure event seating.
Attaching A Seating Plan
Prerequisites
| Requirement | Details |
|---|
| Venue match | Only seating plans belonging to the same venue as the event are available for selection. |
| Plan completeness | The seating plan must be marked as complete before it can be attached. |
| No existing sales | If the event already has sales and no seating plan is attached, a plan can no longer be added. |
Steps
- Open the event dashboard.
- In suggested actions, click Add a seating plan.
- Select an available plan for that event’s venue, or create a new plan.
- Submit to queue the sync.
If the event belongs to a schedule, you can apply the same plan assignment to related events in the same schedule during this step.
What Sync Does
Sync runs in the background and may take time for larger plans. During import:
- Event-level seating entities are created from the plan schema, including event price bands and spaces.
- If the event has timeslots, spaces are created for both the event-level pass and each timeslot.
- The plan dashboard is unavailable while syncing — you are redirected to plan settings until the import completes.
- An in-progress import can be cancelled from the settings page. All processing stops shortly after cancellation.
Plan Settings
Once a seating plan is synced, configure event-level behaviour from Plan settings.
Customer Seat Selection
| Setting | Behaviour |
|---|
| Allow customer seat selection | When enabled, customers can manually pick specific seats in the shop. When disabled, only best available seat allocation is used. |
| Focus shop view on available seats | Zooms customers into saleable areas and crops unavailable areas when navigating the plan in the shop. |
| Display remaining general admission spaces in shop | Shows the remaining quantity for general admission areas. |
Best Available Seats
Best available seats suggests optimal seat allocation based on scoring and price band logic. The feature requires a focal point to be set on the seating plan.
Best available seat controls only appear when the feature is enabled for the
company. If no focal point exists on the plan, the option is unavailable. To
enable it, edit the seating plan to add a focal point and then resync.
| Setting | Behaviour |
|---|
| Enable best available seats | Activates best-seat suggestions. General admission spaces and seats for tables requiring full-table booking are excluded from suggestions. |
| Best available seats adjacency mode | Controls how seats are grouped: Any (adjacent or otherwise), Prefer adjacency (prefer adjacent but permit non-adjacent), or Only adjacent (only adjacent seats are permitted). |
Orphan Seat Protection
| Setting | Behaviour |
|---|
| Enable orphan seat protection | Reduces stranded single-seat gaps during both best available and manual seat selection. On manual selection, the system prevents leaving empty seats in the middle or on the sides of a selection sequence. |
Orphan seat protection cannot be enabled when the adjacency mode is set to
Any. The Any mode naturally fills orphaned seats as capacity
approaches 100%.
Automatic Ticket Selection
When multiple tickets are mapped to the same seat, automatic ticket selection picks one for the customer.
| Setting | Behaviour |
|---|
| Enable automatic ticket selection | Auto-selects a ticket when multiple tickets exist for a seat. Free tickets are excluded from automatic selection. |
| Automatic ticket selection mode | Lowest price (selects the cheapest ticket) or Highest price (selects the most expensive ticket). |
Assigning Tickets To Price Bands
- Tickets and season tickets are mapped to event price bands in plan settings.
- Seats and areas in price bands without any mapped sale items are not saleable.
- At least one sale item must be assigned to a price band before the plan dashboard becomes available.
Resyncing And Changing Plans
After initial attachment, use Resync plan from plan settings to apply updates from the source plan.
Apply Revisions
Factory Reset
Applies new seating plan revisions made since the last completed sync. This adds new seats and spaces and applies structural changes without affecting event-specific customisations like seat statuses or holds. Rebuilds the event seating data from the source plan state. This overrides all event-specific modifications including:
- Seat statuses
- Price bands
- Holds
Factory reset is recommended during event setup only. If the event is already on sale, it will become unavailable for customers while being reset. Large plans with more than 10,000 seats may take over an hour to reset.
Plan Dashboard
Once synced and configured, the event plan dashboard provides tools for managing the event’s seating data.
Navigation
- View by event pass or by individual timeslot.
- Navigate the full plan or focus on specific areas.
Seat Status Management
Each space can be set to one of four statuses:
| Status | Behaviour |
|---|
| Available | The seat can be purchased. |
| Unavailable | The seat cannot be purchased. |
| Hidden | The seat is hidden from the shop and box office and cannot be purchased. |
| Restricted | The seat is restricted to specific roles or holds. |
Kills
In ticketing operations, teams often use kills to mean spaces removed from sale.
In this platform, that is handled through seat status changes:
- Use Hidden when a space should be removed from sale and hidden from customer-facing views.
- Use Unavailable when a space should be removed from sale but still shown as unavailable.
If you need to remove spaces from the seating plan structure itself (rather than applying an event status), use the Editor tooling and then apply sync/revision updates to events.
Other Dashboard Actions
- Restrict seats to holds and create new holds inline.
- Reprice selected spaces to different price bands.
- Reallocate sold or reserved seats.
- Export plan images.
