Glyndebourne Opera
Socially Distanced SYOS
- Digital Strategy
- Tessitura Integration
The challenge
We have been working with Glyndebourne Opera for over 10 years, supporting them with their Tessitura-integrated ecommerce path, powered by our BlocksOffice platform.
For their Autumn 2020 performances, Glyndebourne Opera was faced with the challenge of how best to handle social distancing requirements in their reserved seating maps. Glyndebourne faced the challenge of ensuring that patrons were kept a safe distance apart during a performance, but also retained as many of the customer experience benefits of allowing their audience to choose their own seats.
What we did
Working in consultation with the team at Glyndebourne, we decided the best approach in terms of user experience was to handle Select your Own Seat with tickets set out in pairs, with surrounding seats/rows blocked out with holds to enable physical distancing.
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The approach took into consideration existing tools within BlocksOffice as well as inherent Tessitura functionality to mark sold seats in SYOS, to indicate to the customer the difference between occupied and seats that were being left unoccupied to achieve physical distancing.
Using holds in Tessitura, Glyndebourne laid out the venue so that only socially distanced pairs and occasional single seats were available.
By preventing the purchase of single seats and adding user messages, we inform users that it is not possible to purchase a single seat via the website. We have also added an additional COVID icon that indicates social distancing seats (these with a specific hold code) so they were easy to distinguish from occupied seats.
Once developed by Made, the social distancing map was tested internally and on the development environment with Glyndebourne before deployment in time for the planned on-sale date.
As social distancing rules changed to allow for venue capacity to be increased, we accommodated to sell to bigger groups for example 3 or 4 seats. The configuration of this was handled within the BlocksOffice control panel. Using this tool, Glyndebourne is able to indicate a group of seats that need to be sold together. This allows them to create groups of 3-4 seats and make better use of venue capacity.
Impact
The ultimate gain was the creation of a socially distanced bubble around Glyndebourne’s patrons and supporters, providing them with additional reassurance during these uncertain times. Furthermore, Glyndebourne was able to have an on-sale which fulfilled the government COVID requirements for social distancing.
800+ Social distanced tickets sold
76% Of transactions completed in under 10 minutes
What we did.
- Tessitura integration
- Strategic definition
- User experience concept
