Using Passes - Annual Memberships, Bundles or Passes

Why consider Passes/memberships/bundles?

Our passes feature can be used to offer discounted and exclusive tickets for loyal members of your community.

The pass can be created as a monthly, or annual membership with perks, or as a package/ticket bundle deal. Some use cases include offering tickets to a whole sporting season, offering a bundle deal to a multi-event festival, or for a promoter with many events that wants to offer special prices to loyal customers.

It’s very useful for keeping track of attendance and controlling your capacity. It may be used to increase attendance, if a passholder has an option to come to an event for free.

What are passes?

By buying a pass, or adding one to the checkout when building their baskset, your customer immediately unlocks access to your exclusive ticket types, or discounts.

Passes can optionally be restricted by usage, for example a pass can be valid for 10 uses/tickets. Passes can also be restricted by a time period, for example 3 months. Once the pass has been fully used by the customer,  or is approaching expiry, the customer can purchase another pass to extend their existing one.

By having a pass as an option, customers can claim tickets against your capacity on a first-come-first-serve basis, helping you monitor overall attendance and capacity.

You can create multiple passes with different ticket inclusions across your events, for example if you wanted to to create Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers.

How do we use passes?

Prerequisites

Before continuing with this guide, you should have read the following:

1. Create and configure your organiser profile
2. Create an event, set up your venue and add a date
3. How to set up your first ticket

Define requirements

We will guide you through the setup of your first pass by using the ‘Create Pass’ wizard found in Multi-event tools > Passes.

Before you create your pass, you should:

1. Decide what your pass is going to be called, and write a description for it.
1. Remember, you don’t need to call it a ‘pass’ at all. Some name ideas could be; ‘Gold membership’, ‘Activity bundle’ or ‘Season Pass’.

2. Decide what restrictions will apply to your pass
1. Will your pass have an expiry after purchase?
2. Will your pass have a usage limit?

3. Decide whether you are offering exclusive tickets, or discounting existing tickets.

Once you have understood your requirements we can continue.

Preparing ticket types

You will have to create at least one new ticket type (known as an ‘activating ticket’) which will be used to ‘activate’ your pass when purchased by a customer.

You can add the ‘activating ticket’ to your existing event, or you could create a dedicated event solely for the purpose of pass tickets. We will link together the newly created tickets later on in the pass wizard.

When adding the ticket type, name it as the pass name and price it how you would like. Add in your pass description as the ticket description. Set the quantity to be the limit of the number of passes you wish to accommodate.

Also think about the ‘max per customer’ setting in ‘Advanced options’. Do you want this pass to be purchased only once, or do you want the customer to be able to repurchase the pass again and again once they have reached their usage/expiry? All other advanced ticket options are still available to the ‘activating ticket’.

Click “Add ticket” to create the ticket type.

Next - Did you decide to offer exclusive tickets for your pass? This is a good time to add your tickets. Go into your event and create these special ticket types now; they could have a price or they could be free.

Pass wizard

Now, let’s go into the Pass wizard and create your actual pass.

1. In your organiser dashboard, visit Multi-event tools > Passes.
2. Click ‘Add Pass’ to start the wizard.
3. Name your pass and click ‘Next’.
4. Select all the events that are relevant to your pass - those containing exclusive or to-be-discounted tickets, and those containing the newly created ‘activating ticket’. Click ‘Next’.
5. Choose the relevant tickets from those events, and click ‘Next’.
6. Now sort the tickets - for this example, you should move your ‘activating ticket’ into the left hand ‘Activates Pass’ column, and all other tickets should be sorted into the right hand ‘Requires Pass’ column. Once you are happy, click ‘Next’.
7. Now you are brought to the ‘Discounts’ tab. Each ‘requires pass’ ticket should be listed. Consider for each ticket;
1. If you would like the ticket type to be exclusive to passholders, check the ‘Only purchasable with pass’ checkbox
2. If you would like the ticket type to be discounted or free for passholders, uncheck the ‘Only purchasable with pass’ checkbox and set your discounts price. For free tickets, enter ‘0.00’ Tap ‘Next’ to continue.

8. Set your expiry if you wish; you have three options -
1. A fixed expiry date - for example, a known date at the end of a sports season
2. A time period (eg. 2 weeks, 3 months or 1 year) - for example, 3 months. When a customer purchases, they will be able to access discounts for a 3 month period. The customer will be able to repurchase the pass to add 3 months to their expiry date.
3. No expiry date.

9. Set your usage allowance -
1. Either keep unlimited for time period set in the previous step
2. Or set to a fixed usage number - for example, 10 uses. This will allow the customer to claim 10 exclusive, free or discounted tickets. The customer will be able to re-purchase the pass to top up their usage allowance.

Click ‘Next’ to move to the review stage.

10. Review your selections and add the pass.

Now return to your event page(s) to review the pass as the customer sees it.

Customer Experience

The customer simply needs to add the pass (‘activating ticket’) to their basket, or purchase the pass on its own, in order to access the discounted, free, or exclusive tickets.

Customers without a pass in their basket or account will not be able to access the discounted tickets.

You can issue yourself a pass using the Box Office to experiment with the purchasing flow.

You should write a clear ticket description explaining your pass, and have a writeup of the benefits and inclusions of the pass within your event description, or elsewhere.

Issuing tickets to passholders

You can issue tickets to existing and future passholders using the box office. For example, in a football season you may upload your new fixture/event and wish to automatically issue all passholders a ticket. Or you may want to reward all existing passholders with a drink token ticket.

1. Visit the passes via ‘Multi-event tools > Passes’
2. Find the pass for which you would like to issue tickets to the passholders
3. Click the magic wand icon
4. Choose the event with the ticket you would like to issue and click ‘Sell ticket’
5. Select the ticket and build your customer basket. You can choose multiple tickets, if you wish
6. Choose ‘Also issue this basket to anybody who purchases this season pass in the future’ if you want the next person who buys a pass to also receive this ticket/basket
7. Click Issue tickets. Your passholders will start to receive their tickets

Conclusion

A well-configured pass setup is a learning curve, but your loyal customer base will love the exclusive tickets and you will have a greater understanding of your final attendance and capacity.