Venues will eventually be allowed to re-open to the public after the confinement period. However it is possible that this will happen progressively and only if venues are able to implement social distancing restrictions. Depending on the actual physical layout of venues, the difficulty of implementing such restrictions may vary greatly. Nonetheless this article contemplates how it could be implement on the seat map and more importantly what it will mean in terms of customer journey.

This article obviously does not claim to define what social distancing rules should be implemented to guarantee the safety of the attendance but only how to implement them, in the invent that such rules are defined by the authorities. Each venue should comply to the respective rules of their country of operation.

Configuration

The configuration would simply require creating a new logical configuration to invalidate certain seats by selecting them on the map. The pattern selection tool will allow you to easily select the desired seats according a plethora of configurable patterns.

Sales

With such a configuration, optimal selection of seats will be impacted. For example, in the first screenshot, no two free seats will be contiguous and the segmentation pattern will always result in seats being allocated one by one.

For example, requesting 3 seats will systematically be treated as 1+1+1, meaning the system will first find the best available seat, then the best one remaining and again for the last one. Depending on the optimal selection configuration of the venue, those 3 seats may be in very different parts of the map. This is would typically be the case for smaller venues using the ellipsis tool. In such a scenario, we would thus recommend to let the customer select his seats directly on the map. The resulting selection would still not be contiguous but it would probably limit the frustration coming from being allocated very far apart.

For larger venues relying on the snake tool, the impact of the absence of neighbors should be limited as the system will still assign seats following the snake.

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