Enhanced Accessibility Tools

Step-by-Step Guide: Selling Holds Online and Accessible Seating

TicketSearch has introduced a suite of accessibility-focused enhancements to both the Hold Functionality and Ticket Type Build features. These updates offer greater flexibility in managing accessible seating, collecting relevant customer information, and ensuring smoother online booking experiences. From enabling online sales of specific hold types to enforcing purchase dependencies and custom questionnaires, these tools help ensure a more inclusive and compliant ticketing process, tailored to the needs of all attendees.

Hold Updates – Accessibility Enhancements

We have enhanced our Hold functionality to better support accessibility requirements and streamline the sales process. Key improvements include the ability to sell specific hold types online, link holds to custom questionnaires, display accessibility symbols, and collect additional customer information, all designed to create a more inclusive and informative booking experience. Here is a break-down of all the new updates:

Online View

Backend View

1. Online Sales Availability for Hold Types

You now have the ability to enable online sales for a specific hold type, whether it’s for standard or accessibility-related purposes. This enhancement applies only to Reserved Seating (RS) standalone events and deals.

When the “Allow this hold type to be sold online” question is toggled on during hold creation or editing, the selected hold type becomes available for purchase via your online sales channels.

Important: This setting does not apply to General Admission events, Subscriptions, or Packages.

Once enabled:

  • The hold type is treated as part of the online inventory.
  • Its seats will be factored into the event’s sales status, such as “Allocation Exhausted” or “Sold Out.”

Example – Reserved Seating Events

  • A reserved seating event has 100 total seats:
    • 80 seats open to the public
    • 10 staff hold seats
    • 10 promoter hold seats
  • If only the Staff Hold is set to allow online sales, the event will be marked as “Allocation Exhausted” once the 80 public seats and 10 staff-held seats are sold.
  • The 10 promoter-held seats will not be available for online booking and are excluded from the sales status calculation.

Example – General Admission Events

  • A general admission event with the same seat breakdown (80 public, 10 staff, 10 promoter) will still only mark “Allocation Exhausted” after all 80 public seats are sold.
  • Even if the Staff Hold is enabled for online sales, GA events will not include held seats in the online sales pool or the status calculation. Held seats remain excluded from the customer-facing availability.

2. New Questionnaire Integration

When adding or editing a hold type, you now have the option to associate it with a pre-existing questionnaire. This ensures that any time the hold type is used, the user is prompted to complete the selected questionnaire, allowing for consistent data collection, particularly useful for accessibility-related holds (e.g., wheelchair access, companion seating, etc.).

Please note the following:

  • You can only select from existing questionnaires via a dropdown menu.
  • New questionnaires cannot be created from within the Hold Template setup screen.
  • To create or manage questionnaires, navigate to Tools & Templates > Questionnaires/Surveys. Once created, they will appear in the dropdown for selection.

3. Identifying Accessible Seating Types

You can now specify whether a hold type is related to any of the following:

  • Accessible Seating
  • Companion/Carer Seating
  • Hearing Loop Seating

When you select “Yes” to indicate that the hold type is accessibility-related, a set of three radio buttons will appear, each associated with one of the options above. Each selection is accompanied by its corresponding accessibility symbol, ensuring clarity for both administrators and customers.

4. Customisable Accessible Seat Message

When selecting Accessible Seating, you will have the option to configure a custom pop-up message that appears during the online purchase process.

  • This message is designed to inform customers that the space is reserved for accessibility purposes.
  • The default prompt might read:
    “This space is reserved for accessible seating purposes. Please click Yes to confirm or No to cancel.”
  • This message can be customised, up to 250 characters, to suit your venue’s specific language or tone.

5. Collecting Additional Accessibility Information

If you would like to collect more detailed information from customers booking accessibility-related seats, you can enable the option:
“Allow customers to add accessibility comments or special requests to their orders.”

When enabled:

  • Three customisable text fields will appear:
    1. Heading – e.g., “Do you have any specific accessibility requirements?” Note: The heading is mandatory and cannot be left blank.
    2. Intro Description – Provide brief instructions or context.
    3. Tip – Include a short prompt to guide the customer on what to enter.

You may leave the Intro Description and Tip fields blank if not needed, but a Heading must always be provided.

This will appear in the online sales flow as below:

6. Visual Display and Recommendations

  • When accessibility-related holds are used, it’s recommended to use a darker hold colour, as the accessibility symbols are displayed in white for optimal contrast.
  • This accesiblity comment is per ticket, meaning customers will be required to enter information for each accessible ticket they purchase.
  • Customers will see the selected colour, symbol, and label associated with accessible seats during online booking. These will also appear in the Map Key for additional clarity.

When selecting an accessible seat online, the corresponding accessibility symbols will be displayed as shown below:

Ticket Type Build – Accessibility & Dependency Settings

The Ticket Type Build feature has been expanded to give you greater control over how tickets are configured and sold particularly in accessibility-focused scenarios. You can now enforce purchase dependencies, link ticket types to pre-set questionnaires, restrict ticket availability to accessible holds, and collect additional customer details.

1. Questionnaire Activation

This feature allows you to assign an existing questionnaire to a ticket type during the ticket build process. When a customer selects that ticket type, they will automatically be prompted to complete the associated questionnaire, ensuring you collect any required information (e.g., attendee details, preferences, etc).

Questionnaires must be pre-created under Tools & Templates > Questionnaires/Surveys, only existing questionnaires appear in the dropdown.

Important Note:

To prevent online transaction errors:

  • Assign a unique questionnaire at the ticket type level.
  • Avoid assigning the same questionnaire at both the ticket type and hold levels, as this can cause the questionnaire to fail during checkout.

2. Purchase Dependency

This feature is designed to enforce ticket type dependencies ensuring that certain ticket types can only be purchased in combination with others.

When selecting ‘Yes’ to the following question: “Do you want this ticket type to be purchased only when other ticket type(s) are also selected?”, it requires that a specific ticket type (e.g., a child ticket) must be purchased together with one or more other designated ticket types (e.g., an adult ticket).

This is useful in scenarios such as ensuring children are only admitted with a supervising adult.

Note: Selecting ‘Yes’ to this question, brings up some additional options better explained below.

3. Dependency Requirement: ANY vs. ALL

When you set up dependent ticket types, you can control whether customers must purchase any one of them or all at once. Prompt: “Are all the selected ticket type(s) required when purchasing this ticket type?”

  • ANY: The customer needs to add at least one of the specified ticket types to their cart alongside the main ticket. For example, if a Child ticket depends on Adult and Concession tickets, choosing ANY means the order is valid with a Child plus either an Adult or a Concession ticket.
  • ALL: The customer must include every ticket type you’ve selected. Using the same example, selecting ALL requires a Child ticket with both an Adult and a Concession ticket in the same transaction.

4. Accessibility‑Only Holds

This option “Should this ticket type be available only with accessibility seats/holds?” determines whether dependent ticket types are limited to accessible seating holds when purchasing online.

  • Selecting No: Customers can purchase dependent tickets from any available seat, there are no hold restrictions.
  • Selecting “Yes” means that Adult and/or Concession tickets must be booked from accessible holds, while Companion tickets can be purchased from any available seat. Example: If a Companion ticket depends on Adult and Concession tickets, selecting Yes requires all three tickets to be booked from accessible holds for the same event session.
  • Important:
    • This restriction applies only to Reserved Seating events that are enabled for online sales. For General Admission events, holds remain backend‑only and are not visible during online booking.
    • Selecting Yes automatically enables and locks the Ticket Ratio enforcement (see section 5).

5. Ticket Ratio Enforcement

This option ensures that you sell dependent tickets in a controlled ratio alongside the main ticket type.

  • If you select Yes, the system enforces a 1:1 ratio between the ticket you’re creating and each dependent ticket type. Example: When selling Companion tickets with Concession as the dependent type, a customer can only purchase one Companion ticket for each Concession ticket in their cart—two Companions would require two Concessions.
  • If you select No, there is no limit on the number of main tickets per dependent ticket; customers could buy multiple Companion tickets with a single Concession ticket.
  • Automatic Enabling: If Accessibility‑Only Holds is set to Yes, the ticket ratio is automatically turned on and cannot be disabled, ensuring consistency with accessible seating requirements.

6. Collect Additional Ticket Information

If you’d like to gather more details from your customers, you can enable up to six custom fields during checkout. Simply toggle Yes to the question: Would you like to collect additional ticket information? to activate these fields. Note: any field you leave blank won’t appear.

For example, when supporting Carer or Companion card holders, you might collect an ID number, its expiry date, and even allow an image upload for proof. To ensure data consistency, the second field will always be a date, and the fourth will always accept an image.

Once a particular field has been used in at least one order, you’ll have the option to hide it from future checkouts if you no longer need to collect that information, this checkbox remains disabled until the field has been saved at least once.

7. Is this information related to accessibility?

This question is intended for reporting purposes. Select “YES” if the information being collected is specifically related to accessibility needs (e.g., wheelchair access, hearing assistance). When set to “YES”, the information will appear in both the Accessibility Report and the DoorList Report. If you select “NO”, the information will be treated as general and will only appear in the DoorList Report.

Online Sales Flow:

When collecting Additional Ticket Information, the fields will appear on the online checkout page as shown below:

Here are a few scenarios illustrating how your ticket type configuration will behave:

  1. For example, to purchase a companion ticket, you must also add both an adult ticket and a concession ticket to your cart.

If you try to purchase a companion ticket without those two ticket types, the following error message will be displayed.

2. If you select “Yes” to the question “Should this ticket type be available only with accessibility seats/holds” during the ticket type setup, then that ticket type can only be purchased from accessible holds.

If you attempt to purchase it outside of those designated holds, the following error will appear. Note, this error will also appear if you attempt to make a purchase outside of the ticket ratio.

3. When attempting to remove a dependent ticket type from the shopping cart, the below error will be shown: