Hide tickets from the public (comp, volunteer and invite-only tickets)
Michel (Product @Zeffy)
Organizers want to create a ticket on their form without showing it to everyone. Today the only workaround is to build the ticket at the last minute, or to delete it and recreate it later.
This is different from scheduling a ticket's sales window, which is now available. Scheduling controls when a ticket can be bought, and the ticket stays visible on the form with its status. This request is about ticket types that should not appear publicly at all.
The situations that come up most often:
Comp and free tickets. Organizations give free tickets to guests, sponsors or board members, and would rather the public not see that a $0 ticket exists.
Volunteer tickets. The same need for volunteers, usually with the wish to keep them as their own ticket type in the guest list instead of adding each person by hand.
Reserved tickets. Holding a few tickets for hosts, speakers or specific patrons who may not buy right away, including on an event that is otherwise sold out.
Group or discounted rates for a specific audience. A reduced rate for a partner organization or a particular group, which should not be offered to everyone.
Access-code tickets. Revealing a hidden ticket only to people who enter a code you gave them, rather than a discount code that applies to the whole order.
What organizers describe wanting:
A way to mark a ticket as hidden and to unhide it later, without deleting and recreating it.
Optionally, a code that reveals a hidden ticket to the people who have it.
Hidden tickets still showing normally in the guest list and in reports, so attendance stays easy to follow.
If this matters to your organization, please upvote and tell us which of these cases is yours. It helps us scope the right first version.
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WhoDunnit
We would LOVE this feature.
We are a nonprofit theatre company putting on dinner theatre productions at local restaurants. Our main use for this would be "at-cost" tickets. Each cast/crew member in one of our shows gets two discounted tickets that comp our portion of the fee (for the show) and just cover the restaurant's portion (for the meal). Right now, we have to create a unique discount code for each and every person for every single campaign, which is a huge hassle.
What's more, we can only limit those codes by "uses per date," not total uses, which means they could book more discounted tickets for multiple performance dates instead of just the two at-cost tickets they are allotted, and when we have multiple venue options (with one "campaign" for each), we'd need coupon codes that worked across campaigns and had an OVERALL use limit.
Since we already can't really limit the discount code use properly and have to rely on everyone to be honorable and honest, the "hidden ticket" type would at least save us a lot of trouble of having to generate the codes for everyone, and we could limit purchases to two in a single transaction, which at least does the same thing as the coupon code. It won't stop them from making multiple transactions... but then again, neither does the coupon code stop them from using it on multiple dates.
In any case, we would absolutely need to see all these ticket types included on the report!
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WhoDunnit
ALSO: We have Season Ticket Holders who pay a membership fee at the beginning of our season (year), which includes one "free" ticket to each of our shows. We'd like them to be able to book their "free" tickets for each show using the regular form. We manage their membership via a Zeffy campaign but currently have to book their tickets to shows for them via the "add manual payment - free" option, rather than letting the customers do so themselves.
We can't utilize the "members-only" ticket types to create a free ticket for them because 1) it requires our members to log in, which they aren't comfortable doing, and 2) we have no way to limit the number of tickets per membership, which means one member could book extra free tickets. The only way we could let them do so themselves is generating a 100% off coupon code for them... but even then, we run into the above mentioned issues with limiting coupon code use.
Having a hidden ticket type would be a helpful way to get around them having to log in or having to generate a unique discount code for each person, but we still need some way to better limit sales.
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Naomi
We create group tickets that we don’t want publicly shown that we send out to our venue for them to sell to their members.
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Sara
In the past, we have had to make a separate campaign for "internal" ticket types (staff, performers, volunteers, vendors), so admin could make these manually. However it is a challenge for the folks checking people into the event to go back and forth between campaigns, and especially difficult when someone needs a special ticket type as well as a general admission ticket type under the same name (ie a 'hidden' performer ticket, plus their general admission comps).
The ability to hide ticket types from public view would allow us to keep the entire guest list (including staff, vendors, etc) in 1 campaign, and track attendance more easily from one place. This is one of our most needed features, thanks for working on this!
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Amen
Yes, this would be incredibly useful, specifically for reserved tickets, or "holds" Right now, if we want to hold tickets for special guests, comps, or 'waitlist' room, we have to book them under our name, then cancel them to make them available, or sell them totally off of Zeffy if we want to add 'standing room' or overflow room. Being able to mark a ticket as hidden, and then being able to unhide when it becomes useful, will help us create wiggle room in our capacity that is necessary for us without putting those tickets on public sale. Thank you for working on it!
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Ed
I would use all of those use cases, with "Reserved Tickets" being the most important; "Access-code tickets" would be the least important.