📣 COMING SOON: New Seating Charts Feature – Follow the progress here and let us know what you think: https://app.loopedin.io/the-events-calendar-suite-roadmap?card=64dd3b02a4138300297bf53e

Suppose that you’re distributing tickets to an event with limited venue seating (such as a theater or seated banquet), and you’d like to offer your attendees the option to choose their own row or table in advance. You can easily accomplish this task using the stock options and multiple ticket types available with Event Tickets.

There are two ways to do that. Let’s check those out.

Using Eventbrite Tickets

We actually offer an add-on to The Events Calendar called Eventbrite Tickets. The add-on is designed to sync events between WordPress and Eventbrite, but it has the bonus of being able to support seating charts since that is an Eventbrite feature for Eventbrite Professional and Premium accounts.

If you have a Professional or Premium account, then you will have access to Eventbrite’s seating charts feature and can follow their detailed tutorial on how to set it up.

Using ticket types

We’ll use a simple seating chart image to demonstrate how to set up your ticket groups. This graphic shows three rows (A, B, and C) with a total of nine seats per row.

Sample seating chart

Of course, you’ll want to begin by creating a new event, post, or page for your tickets (or editing an existing event, post, or page). If you need help getting started with event creation using The Events Calendar, our Knowledgebase article here provides a full rundown of the process.

If you have a seating chart image available for your venue, you can embed it into your event’s description for easy reference (using the Add Media button above the main event description field) or provide a link to the uploaded image elsewhere on your site. Once you’ve successfully added your seating chart (or if you don’t have an image available for your venue), let’s scroll right down to the Tickets heading to begin setting up our tickets. Click Add New Ticket to open the ticket creation form for your first ticket.

Example of how to set up tickets when selling from a seating chart

This image shows some example fields for selling tickets using Event Tickets Plus and WooCommerce, but this process should be much the same for allocating free seats via RSVP. Here, I’ve named my ticket type by the associated row on our seating chart, and I’ve set the available stock to nine–the number of seats available in this row. This allows me to set different pricing tiers for different seating sections if desired and limits stock for each section so that tickets of a given type cannot be oversold.

Once you’ve finished entering the details for your first ticket section, click Save this ticket to commit your changes. After repeating this process for all of your tickets, you can verify that everything looks correct, then scroll up and click the Publish button to save all of your tickets and publish them to your site.

You’re all finished! The above image shows what our event looks like with our seating chart and ticket blocks configured properly. Now your visitors have the option to select their preferred section in advance, and you can easily keep track of where your attendees are located on the backend of your site.

We hope that this tutorial has shown you how simple it is to adapt Event Tickets and Event Tickets Plus to meet specific ticketing needs such as these. Feel free to use this guide as a reference for developing your own ticketing solutions! Thanks for reading, and as always, please don’t hesitate to pay us a visit at our help desk if you should have any questions!