Repeating Events
HoldMyTicket offers some advanced repeating settings that allow you to easily manage your events, tickets, and customers when you have an ongoing series of dates or showtimes.
Simply create the event once, classify it as a repeating event and choose the frequency and end date, and an event will be created for all of the dates you want, all at once!
Why use repeating settings?
This is an important way to determine that the tickets you sell for an ongoing show are specifically for a single showtime. If you have your event every Friday night for a month, this is how you allow customers to pick which Friday they want to attend, and you can keep track of attendance for each night and never oversell your venue.
In this doc, our example is a ballet production, but this feature is useful for all kinds of events: city tours, sports games, theatrical plays, escape rooms, and much more.
How to Set Up Your Repeating Event
Get started by creating one event. This event will be your Master repeating event, and it will be the model for all future events of the series.
Set up the master event to have a title, description, media, and any other settings that you'd like to apply to all of your shows. Under the Tickets section, create appropriate tickets that reflect entry for a single show. If there will be some differences between shows, that's ok. Try to cover the big picture (and the most widely-applicable details) here in the master, and you can make unique changes later.
Choosing Dates:
Base the Master event's start- and end- dates and times specifically on the production's premiere show. Below the dates, use the 'Repeats' option to choose a type of frequency in which the shows will occur, and then select the end date for the whole series.
For example, if the series occurs once a month from October through December, choose Repeats -> Every Month. Then choose the final date in December under 'Repeat Until.'
If you need something more unique, choose Custom. For an example, if there are shows Thursday through Saturday every other week, choose Custom -> Weekly -> Every 2 Weeks, and select Thursday, Friday and Saturday from the days of the week.
As you work on the Master, remember that this one event represents a single night, so select all of your dates appropriately. For example, ticket sales will stop the night of this show, not when the whole production has come to a close.
In this example, the Master event is on Oct. 6, so ticket sales for this show will also end Oct. 6:
Once you've wrapped up the dates and done as much general setup on the event as you want, save the event.
Now, if you return to your Upcoming Events list, you will see that your list has populated with events on all of the dates you chose.
Making Edits
Now that you've built your series, you can use the master event to make changes to its repeating events. When you edit the master, as soon as you click save, you have the choice to apply this change to all events that follow. You can also edit an event other than the Master, and changes will apply only to that event and those that follow, but the events before it won't be affected.
This includes the editing of tickets. If you create new tickets on the Master event, those new tickets will be added to all future tickets, unless you un-check the box, "Apply changes to all future event tickets." The same idea applies to deleting tickets or making edits to the existing tickets.
You can make changes to individual events without affecting the whole series. For example, Saturday is a matinee show, but the initial event creation set all of the showtimes to 7 pm. You can edit each Saturday individually to fix its start time, and when you save, click "Only This Event."
Be careful using this setting - one quick edit to an event can have a big influence on the whole series!
The Customer Experience
Another bonus to using repeating events is the events are grouped on the front end of HoldMyTicket! The event page of any event in the series will display all of its associated repeating events, listed in chronological order.
The checkout page provides a dropdown menu of all associated events.
This makes it easy for ticket buyers to navigate around your event calendar and get exactly what they need!
If you are previewing your event page or checkout page and don't see the other repeating events here, remember that it will only display published events. If you're still working on setting up your events and they are on hold, you won't be able to see this feature quite yet.
Bonus Feature: Coupons
Coupon codes can be managed at the repeating-ticket level - Hallelujah!
From the event overview of the master event (or the earliest event to use this coupon), open the coupon generator. Begin creating a new coupon code (click here to learn about using coupon codes).
As you begin choosing tickets to apply the coupon to, a checkbox will appear letting you create the coupon for future events, and apply it to that ticket.
If you use this feature, and return to edit the coupon and remove it from a ticket, you'll see the checkbox option again to remove it from future event tickets.
Managing Event Grouping
You can tell if an event is repeating if there is a link icon next to it in your upcoming events list. The link icon with the blue arrow indicates the master event.
If you need to add an existing event to your repeating series, or disconnect an event from the series, use the Repeating Settings in the event overview.
To add an event to the series, open Repeating Settings from that event's overview, and use the dropdown to select the master event, and click "Link Event." Repeating Event Options will be grayed out if its not already a repeating an event. Don't be swayed, you can click it anyways!
To remove an event, open its Repeating Settings and its master event will be shown. Click "Disconnect From Repeating Event." (This is not the same as deleting or cancelling the event. It will just be unlinked from the series.)
