S-360 already provides the possibility to buy financial vouchers and give them to some friend or family member. S-360 now manages experience vouchers that can be directly redeemed with a ticketing product (for the moment: only events and open passes) without any payment process, thus providing a user experience better suited to a gifting process.

Current scope

With the current feature, experience vouchers only concern events, competitions and open passes. They will be extended to visit passes and memberships in the future.
Currently, experience vouchers have to be bought on the box office and redeemed on Ticket Shop. In future releases, both purchase and redemption (exchange) processes will be available on box office and ticket shop
Experience vouchers are also available as bundles (S-360 packages) also called Scheck Abo, a German expression designating a season ticket containing a bundle of experience vouchers. With the current feature, this bundle doesn't provide to its owner the privileges of a season ticket holder (for example, access to season ticket holder tariffs) but this option will be provided in a later release.

Solution

The experience vouchers involve following steps:

Configure the experience voucher, in particular define the products the voucher may be redeemed (or exchanged) with
A first contact purchases the voucher (currently, only possible on the box office)
The voucher purchaser gives the voucher to a second contact, called the voucher holder or beneficiary
The voucher holder redeems the voucher online with one of the products defined during set-up

Set-up of the experience voucher

Define the VAT perception policy

Before defining the experience voucher, you have to decide at which time the VAT will be computed, because this will have an impact on the voucher set-up. S-360 lets you the choice between

VAT perception at voucher sale: a directive in the European Union obliges to use this option if all information to perceive the VAT are already known at this stage (for example, same VAT rate for all the products that can be exchanged with the voucher)
VAT perception at voucher redemption: in the European Union, this option can only be used if VAT cannot be perceived at the time of voucher sale

Set-up the open products

You have to create an open product that will be used automatically by S-360 during the redemption process in order to ensure accounting consistency. More precisely, you have to create one open product for each VAT code of experience voucher. This needs to be done only once per season. Provide following information during set-up:

A meaningful internal and external name in order to ease the later set-up of the experience voucher and to ensure a pretty looking order summary page
The VAT code that you plan to use for your experience vouchers. If you perceive VAT at voucher sale, select a VAT code matching a non zero VAT rate. If you perceive the VAT at voucher redemption, select the VAT code matching a zero VAT rate.
Create one item with a very large quota
A dummy price for each tariff that will be used by the experience vouchers and the products that can be received by redeeming these vouchers. Only the tariff matters, not the price. In case of doubt, you can define prices for tariffs you aren't sure they will be used.The open product doesn't need to be added to the product profile (and shouldn't be added to prevent it from being displayed on the Ticket Shop catalog)

Set-up the experience voucher: basic data

The experience voucher is a new product family displayed in the other products section. The current voucher product family as been renamed as financial voucher to avoid any confusion.

Following parameters are specific to the experience voucher:

The section Experience voucher parameters allows you to define an expiry date for the voucher itself. You can define an absolute date or a number of days from the date of purchase. The experience voucher can't be redeemed anymore once the expiry date has been reached.

A redemption period can be defined in the section Redemption parameters. This period may depend on the selected performance date. For example,an experience voucher could be redeemed against a given performance between 30 days (start) and 2 days (end) before the performance takes place. The performance itself doesn't need to be on sale at that date on the concerned sales channel. Of course, in order to redeem the voucher, the expiry date must not have been reached.

The operator must select the open product that will be used automatically by S-360 during the redemption process. The drop-down only displays running products belonging to the same season and having the same VAT code. The open product must not match a gift aid or the cancellation insurance (these are discarded automatically from the drop down list).

Remember to set a VAT code in accordance with your VAT perception policy.

Set-up the experience voucher: list of events and performances linked to the voucher

The screen below allows to list all the events that can be obtained by redeeming the current voucher:

By clicking on the New button, one or more events may be added to the list:

The list may be filtered by name as in the example above. If you perceive VAT at voucher sale time, the product must have the same VAT code as the voucher. If you perceive VAT at voucher redemption time, the product may have any VAT code. The list is filtered accordingly. Note that you may add products belonging to another season.

After having clicked on Add, the event (with all its performances) is added to the list of products that can be acquired with the concerned voucher. If you want to limit the redemption possibility to a subset of performances, you have to double click on the line. The following screen is displayed:

The list of performances will also be filtered according to the VAT code (if the performance has a VAT code different from the event it belongs to).

Set-up the experience voucher: quota and prices

The experience voucher will be bought for a given seat category and tariff. Seat categories are defined at item level, as illustrated below:

The number of vouchers available for each seat category is defined in the quota screen (similar to other product families)

The prices must be defined for each seat category (matching an item) and tariff:

The price of the experience voucher and of the performance that may be acquired with the voucher don't need to match (see the section about the redemption process for more detail). However, the tariff and seat category have to match.

As for any other product family, the experience voucher must be added to the product profile so that it can be bought on the corresponding sales channel (currently, online sales channels aren't supported).

Set-up of Scheck Abo (bundle of vouchers)

Scheck Abos are defined as standard packages. You can find below an illustration of a package containing two experience vouchers with a redefined price for the first one.

Purchase and gifting process

The purchase process is similar to other product families. The buyer has to select the seat category and tariff since, for pricing reasons, the voucher will only be valid for the selected seat category and tariff.

The buyer (in this example: Daniela Schmidt) can give the voucher to somebody else in two ways:

At purchase time, define already the cultural contact to which the voucher has to be assigned (in our example: Alexandra Martin)
Provide the voucher code to the voucher beneficiary

Redemption process

Voucher selection

The beneficiary of a voucher (either because a voucher has been assigned to him/her or because he/she knows the code) can login to his/her user account and select the new menu option Experience vouchers:

The page lists all the vouchers owned by the logged in internet user. When entering a voucher code, the corresponding voucher will be displayed at the top of the list. The page can also display the expired and used vouchers.

Events and performance selection

After having selected one of the vouchers available, the list of available events and performances is displayed:

By default, the performances belonging to events having less than three (redeemable) performances can be selected directly (in the example above: performance Cinderella of 18th of June 2024). If the event contains 3 performances or more, it's displayed in a compact way (in the example above: Swan lake). The internet user may expand the event to see all the available performances by clicking on the arrow:

At any moment, the internet user may dismiss the detailed list of performances by clicking on the up arrow.

The number of performances per event under which events are expanded automatically may be configured. For example, if you want this page to display directly all the performances without the need to expand the events (not recommended because you may end up with a very long list), you would set a very high value. See the Getting started section for more detail.

Finishing the redemption process

Once the internet user has selected a performance and clicked on Redeem, the redemption detail is displayed:

Note that the section title Voucher redemption matches the external name of the open product. It's therefore important to provide it a meaningful name during the set-up.

From this point, the remaining steps of the process are similar to the "purchase" of a free product.

Handling of price differences

The voucher holder will neither be refunded, nor will have to pay in case of a price difference (for the considered seat category and tariff) between the voucher and the performance obtained with the voucher. There is no check neither during the set-up nor during the redemption process.

After redemption, all operations performed on the acquired performance ticket (refund, exchange, upgrade,...) will take only the performance price into account (and not the price of the initial voucher). As a result, you could suffer from a financial loss if you simultaneously:

Accept the redemption of a voucher with a performance of a higher price
Accept the refund of the performance

Getting started

You don't have anything to do to benefit from the experience vouchers. However, you may want to configure the display of the page listing the events/performances.available for a given voucher.

The configuration key config.gravity.RedemptionProducts.groupTriggerQuantity defines the number of performances per event from which the two level display is enabled (expand the event to select a performance). For instance, if config.gravity.RedemptionProducts.groupTriggerQuantity is set to 3, the events having 3 or more performances will be displayed in a compact way.

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