EC Pro – Recurring Events & Tickets

[Mike]

Hi there,

I have a question around recurring events and tickets associated with them.

I currently have Event Tickets Plus & Event Calendar

With Event Calendar Pro, I read that you can create a recurring event, and then if you chose to, you can break the recurrence so they are now all separate events…
I want to know what happens to the tickets in this case.
For example, if i create a daily recurring event which has two tickets, 1 adult and 1 child, and I then split the event into separate events, does it automatically create new tickets for each of the now separate events?

I need to know because i have a client who has 2 events, both of which occur daily for 4 months.
1 of the events has 4 tickets, the other has 2 tickets.

At this point, I tried using a post duplicator but the problem is it only duplicates the event itself, i then need to go in, change the dates, add new tickets, update the dates on those, rinse and repeat.
Doing the numbers, this would mean 240 duplicates and then 1400+ manual ticket creations….. that’s no fun at all.

I am hoping that with EC Pro, I could create 1 event including the tickets, make it recurring, then break it into separate events which will automatically all get their own tickets..?? Is this the case, or am i stuck here for the next week creating tickets…

I have a second question on this too, but i will wait for the response first.

Thanks
Mike

[Caroline]

Hi Mike,

Thanks so much for stopping by and taking a look at our plugins! While it’s currently possible to add tickets to a recurring event or event series with Events Calendar PRO and Event Tickets Plus, it’s worth noting that full support for recurring ticketing is not yet available at this time. Any tickets that are added to an event series will apply to all events within that series with no differentiation between tickets purchased for different days. Tickets for recurring events will also display only for the first instance of a recurring event in the WordPress admin, so splitting an event series will result in only that instance retaining ticket details.

I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news here. 🙁 While adding full support for recurring event tickets has proven to be a challenging task, our development team is still hard at work on this implementation, and we hope to have more details to share regarding its progress soon! Until then, you can keep up with the latest updates on this feature on our UserVoice forum here:

https://tribe.uservoice.com/forums/195723-feature-ideas/suggestions/3685663-recurring-event-support-for-tickets

I hope that helps! Thanks again, and please don’t hesitate to follow up if you should have any other questions!

[Mike]

Hi Caroline,

Thanks for the reply, that answers my question. I guess I need to look at alternative solution.

You mentioned that support for recurring event tickets is being worked on, but also see that the team have been saying that since 2013.

Personally I’m of the belief that the team are not working on this and have no intention of adding support for recurring event tickets.
If that is not the case, then why on earth would this highly sought after feature still not be implemented 5 years later?
Secondly, if it is not the case, then provide an ETA, instead of just trying to get sales on hollow promises of a future update that is never going to arrive!

[Caroline]

Hi Mike,

I’m so sorry to hear that you feel that way–I can assure you that as one of our most requested features, the addition of recurring tickets support remains a high priority for our development team. Unfortunately, it can be challenging to provide ETAs for specific features due to the way that development tasks are prioritized within our sprints. Furthermore, the development of this particular feature presents several unique challenges with respect to how recurring events are currently handled, and the final implementation will likely entail a significant restructure of the Events Calendar PRO core. We feel that a well-implemented, virtually bug-free release is worth the extra time spent in development. That said, we’ll certainly continue to communicate with our users as best we can as we’re making steady progress on this task! 🙂

Again, I’m truly sorry for the disappointment here. Though our products might not be the best fit for this particular project at this time, we hope that we might have the opportunity to work with you on another project at some point in the future! Please don’t hesitate to follow up if you should have any other questions or if there’s anything else that we can do for you. Cheers, and thanks again!

[Mike]

But that’s exactly the point Caroline. It’s one of the most requested features yet year after year after year your customers are just told “it’s in the pipeline” without providing any tangible timelines.

And sorry, but i work in IT for a large company delivering projects much larger than this on a regular basis, and there are always timelines – even if they get blown out.
Currently we are working on a 50+ million dollar SAP implementation with multiple other workstreams delivering other ancillary customer facing software packages as well, and you know what – I could tell you exactly what the timelines are for each of the work streams.

To suggest that it’s too complicated to provide your paying customers a timeline for the most requested feature is just really poor customer service in my view.

I see a lot of threads from people who have purchased the product not realising the constraints with recurring events and then requesting refunds. If you just provided something tangible to them they may wait it out.

I think you’ve built a really good product, and I am still using it on this project and others, but I find it really disappointing that you refuse to provide a timeline on this.
If you are managing your development properly it should be a trivial task to map out ETA’s, irrespective of the complexity.

[Barry]

Hi Mike,

I’m sorry that’s a source of disappointment though I do appreciate your perspective on this.

Making timelines public is something we’ve experimented with in the past and we could certainly revisit doing so again in the future but, for the time being, our stance is just as Caroline described and we are unable to offer you even an approximate date for this functionality.

Of course we’d hate to lose a customer, but the fact is full support for recurring tickets is not available at this time and so if this represents a pressing or critical need for you (and solving it via custom development on top of our existing plugins is not an option) then it may be better to invest in a different solution.

As Caroline outlined, we are in the process of refactoring Events Calendar PRO in a way that will better accommodate recurring tickets (amongst other things). It’s not a small or trivial task and it’s going to take some time to complete. If you need to look elsewhere before then, that’s entirely understandable.

Thanks again for your interest 🙂

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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