Glyndebourne Opera
Safely reopening one of opera’s most iconic houses
A choose-your-own-seat experience with automatic social distancing — helping Glyndebourne welcome audiences back with 76% of transactions completed in under 10 minutes.
The challenge
For their Autumn 2020 performances, Glyndebourne Opera needed to implement social distancing requirements in their reserved seating maps while retaining the customer experience benefits of allowing patrons to choose their own seats.
What we did
Working with the Glyndebourne team, we implemented Select Your Own Seat with tickets set out in pairs, using surrounding seat holds to enable physical distancing.
Visit siteThe approach used existing tools within BlocksOffice and Tessitura functionality to mark sold seats in SYOS, indicating to customers the difference between occupied seats and those left unoccupied for physical distancing.
Using holds in Tessitura, Glyndebourne laid out the venue so that only socially distanced pairs and occasional single seats were available. We prevented single seat purchases and added user messages explaining this limitation. A COVID icon indicated social distancing seats (using a specific hold code) to distinguish them from occupied seats.
As social distancing rules changed to allow increased venue capacity, we adapted the system to sell to larger groups of 3-4 seats. This configuration was handled within the BlocksOffice control panel, allowing Glyndebourne to indicate groups of seats that need to be sold together.
Impact
The implementation created socially distanced bubbles around patrons, providing additional reassurance during uncertain times. Glyndebourne achieved an on-sale that met government COVID requirements for social distancing.
