Recurring events and tickets have always been a popular customer request. Now that we’ve reworked our event data storage system as part of The Events Calendar 6.0, we’re ready to address this exciting and complex feature.
The idea of “recurring tickets” can mean different things to different customers. The goal of this article is to explain how our calendar and ticketing plugins can currently be combined, and the future features we’re planning to release. Our goal is a robust, intuitive solution that allows our users to sell tickets for any kind of event, as well as for event Series.
Current Functionality
For now, you cannot add standard tickets (i.e. for a specific date and time) to recurring events. However, with the release of Series Passes, you can now add a pass ticket type that gives an attendee access to all events in a Series, including single events and recurring events! For example, if you have a class that happens weekly for six weeks, you can set that up as a recurring event and then add a Series Pass. People can then purchase a pass and attend each of the six class days.
If you need to sell standard tickets to a set of events, you can add single events to a Series and then add a ticket to each event. That allows you to have standard tickets but also associate the events together on the frontend for your customers. This method could be time-consuming, but it’s an option if you’d like to sell tickets to individual dates of a repeated event.
Planned Functionality
Integrating ticket functionality with recurring events and Series is our next big focus. It’s a massive undertaking, so we’ve broken it down into four main features that we can complete and release one at a time. These features are not yet available.
Basic support for standard tickets on recurring events
As part of our work towards the full Series Tickets feature (see below), you’ll be able to create standard tickets on individual instances of a recurring event, and sell that ticket specifically for that occurrence’s date and time. This will be helpful for some users, but also has limitations: the tickets will have to be created individually, and there are no bulk editing capabilities. That more advanced functionality will be part of Series Tickets.
Series Tickets
For most folks, this is what they’re thinking of when they ask for tickets for recurring events. A Series Ticket is created on a Series post, and then duplicates across all events in a Series including recurring and single events.
Each individual event (i.e. each date) has independent capacity handling, attendee list, ticket SKUs, etc. On the front end, each event shows tickets available, and customers can purchase from the specific event date they want to attend. Each ticket is good for check-in at that specific date and time.
With Series Tickets, you can easily create a recurring event with identical (but independent) tickets for each occurrence. You could also create a Series of events with individual content, such as a weekly concert with different musical acts, and then add the same tickets to all of them.
Series Tickets are created and edited from the Series admin. If you edit a Series Ticket, that change will be propagated across all the events in the Series.
Series Tickets and regular standard tickets will display the same way on the front end, so your customers won’t see any difference. The new ticket types provide more flexibility and functionality behind the scenes for event managers and admin.
Series Passes 2.0
This feature expands the functionality of the simple Series Pass 1.0 and integrates passes with Series Tickets and standard tickets. You can set up a Series Pass to coordinate capacity handling with other ticket types so that when a customer purchases a ticket to an individual event in the Series, the available capacity of the Series Pass also decreases.
Conclusion
The features we’ve laid out above represent many months of strategy, development, and testing, and we’re already working to bring them to life. We’re also continuing to think even further down the roadmap to other exciting ticketing opportunities.
Please keep in mind that we don’t have a timeline for the above features, and the eventual releases may be different than what we have planned. A lot can change once we start working on a project, so we want to set expectations. This article is meant only as an outline and a general feature preview, not a guarantee of future functionality.
You can stay updated on our progress by following ideas on our Roadmap or subscribing to our newsletter.