I recently bought tickets for Hamilton in Houston. (Wonderful!) The buying experience was stressful and frustrating. It’s a given that a seat to a wildly popular event can sell out from under you while you’re looking. But it’s especially galling because one can only search by date (see below). I don’t care what day, I just want the best seat I can find. I can’t help think that’s how most people look at it, especially for a touring show with a limited run.
Am I mistaken and there is a way to do this? (These tix were through Ticketmaster, of course.) Would you prefer this option? How do we make it happen?
Interesting! It would not occur to me to use this option if it existed because
A) I’m usually pretty constrained with regard to date
B) I generally don’t have a lot of money to spend on tickets and
C) I don’t typically care all that much where I sit.
Not denying that for you this would be a useful feature. Just another data point.
I do think it would be a useful feature, especially for someone who lives locally and can be flexible on the date for a sports team’s schedule or a theatre show with an extended run. It seems like it would be an easy feature to program, click on section 101 and then it can pop up a list of dates that tickets are available there.
What don’t mind me describes would be a useful feature, yes. But I don’t think it would be nearly as easy to implement as dalej42 suggests. That would we a lot of searching and processing for little gain.
Target a Tuesday or Wednesday Night and you will likely get the best seats available for the run. Friday and Saturday sell faster so those seats will likely be the worst. Matinees are a wildcard. If there is a Wednesday Matinee (or any weekday really) that is the best bet for a good seat.
Yeah, I think a few people would use a feature like this, but most really do need to pick the date first.
And usability is a huge factor. The best feature in the world is no good if people don’t know it’s there or how to use it. How 'bout this? Type in the show you want to see and the site shows a calendar of what dates the show is playing. Along with each date is the number of seats available. It could even be more specific and show how many were available at each price, or in each category (main floor, box seats, loge, etc.). People who prioritize by date click on the date they want. If you care about getting the best seat, you click on the date that has the most seats still left. And then the rest of the buying process works the same as it does now.
It’s not a perfect system, but I think it’s a good start.
And that’s almost certainly because there are more people constrained by day/date/time than people interested in getting the best seat available even if it’s a weekday matinee. After all, if most people wanted the best seats regardless of the day/time, it wouldn’t be any easier to get good seats at a weekday matinee than for Friday night.
This type of feature is fairly common for searching airline tickets online. So, the model exists in that industry. I think the feature would be useful for event tickets.
SHN, the Broadway show producers in San Francisco, have this system: on the list of show dates, there’s a little symbol for each date that shows current availability: Plenty, moderate, tight, or sold out. So you can choose your date preliminarily based on that info.
Unfortunately, for the run of Hamilton, every date showed sold out almost all the time.
When tickets for the upcoming Hamilton run went on sale to Kennedy Center members in late February, the venue debuted a new “Fast Find” ticket selector tool for online sales. It sounds very much like what y’all are talking about. They published a YouTube video explaining the new ticket selector, but in short you select the number of tickets you want and then perform one of four searches:
[ul]
[li]any date[/li][li]date range[/li][li]specific dates[/li][li]accessible performances[/li][/ul]
From there, you can filter by section, days of the week, times of day, accessibility, and/or price range.
Ticket-buying for popular events at the Kennedy Center has been nightmarish in the past; this was a vast improvement. It was very useful for the Hamilton tix, even though by the time I got to the front of the virtual line (after 12 hours) there were few options left. It was super easy to say “any date” and snag whatever the system came up with – things were moving so fast that the show date changed between the time I clicked “check out” and the time the checkout page loaded!
I ran into a similar problem to the OP. I was looking for 4 tickets to take the girls to see Wicked when it came to town, but it made me choose the date and time before allowing me to select my seats.
The problem was, I searched through about 15 different dates not being able to find 4 seats next to each other. And having to start over every time wore out my patience and I gave up.
So yes, this feature would be very useful.