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Reserved Seating

Revel's reserved-seating system lets any venue — from a 120-seat comedy club to a 2,500-seat theatre — sell assigned seats with a familiar, box-office-grade workflow: a visual layout with price categories, a live seat map for buyers, adjacency-aware "best available" assignment, and a real box office for event night (holds, kills, door sales, comps, and reseats).

These guides are written for sales reps: understand the feature, pitch it honestly, and demo it. Each page has a "Demo it" section with a concrete step path, and a "Talking points & FAQs" section with the questions prospects actually ask — including the honest limits, so you never overpromise.

The four guides

Guide What it covers Best for pitching to
Venue & Layout Setup Venues, seated/standing sectors, the grid editor, natural row ordering, price categories, seat painting The organizer who sets things up once and reuses it
Tickets, Pricing & Seat Assignment The pricing model (zones on the map, prices on the event), per-seat pricing, the three assignment modes, how "best available" picks seats Anyone who asks "can the price depend on the seat?", "can I do student/senior prices?" or "can it seat a family together?"
The Buyer Experience The live availability map, seat holds, checkout, guest checkout, accessible seating The prospect worried about the buyer's experience and double-sells
Box Office & Event-Day Operations Holds/kills, door sales, comps, reseats, seat-on-check-in The actual box-office manager — the person who decides

The five-minute pitch

If you have one prospect and five minutes, tell this story:

  1. "Set up your room once." The organizer draws sectors and seats, and Revel figures out the front-to-back, left-to-right order automatically — no manual seat numbering. Paint price zones with colors (Stalls, Balcony, Boxes). See Venue & Layout Setup.
  2. "Price it however you sell it." Paint zones on the venue, price zones on the event's ticket tier — one mechanism, so the same seats can be premium on Saturday and half-price midweek. Sell the classic theatre way — the buyer picks a seat and pays what that seat costs, front stalls €80, balcony €30, all on one map and one checkout. And because multiple ticket types can share one price zone, you also get adult / student / child prices on the same seats out of the box. Need a zone to have its own cap or its own on-sale date? Give that zone its own tier. See Tickets & Pricing.
  3. "Buyers get a real seat map." They see what's open live, tap to hold seats (so nobody grabs them mid-checkout), and buy. Or they pick a zone, hit "best available", and Revel seats their whole party together in that zone, up front and center — and never quietly hands a wheelchair space to someone who didn't ask for it. See The Buyer Experience.
  4. "And on the night, it's a box office." Hold the house seats for the crew, kill the broken one, sell cash at the door, comp the press, move a guest who complains — and when you scan a ticket you see the seat, so ushers can point. See Box Office.
  5. "No double-sells, ever." Two people can never buy the same seat — the platform guarantees it, and we load-tested it with 50 people fighting over 10 seats. Zero errors, zero double-sells.

Which prospect are you talking to?

Small & scrappy — the comedy club, the 200-seat black box, the jazz bar. They care about: fast setup, cash at the door, comps for friends-of-the-house, and not losing the plot on a busy Friday. Lead with the grid editor (rooms are small, setup is minutes), door sales & comps in the box-office guide, and the fact that there's no per-seat cost or minimum — a standing-room-only night is just a GA sector with a capacity. The Chuckle Cellar (80 seats + 40 standing) in the demo data is your prop.

Big & formal — the theatre, the opera house, the concert hall. They care about: price zones, subscriptions-adjacent pricing, accessible seating done right, holds for production/press, and reseating. Lead with price categories + concession pricing (tiers guide), best-available with accessibility protection (buyer guide), and the hold/kill/reseat box-office toolkit. Teatro Grande (1,352 seats across Platea, Galleria, and four Palco boxes, with painted price zones) is your prop. Also lead with per-seat prices — pick your seat, pay what that seat costs — which is the model they already run today. Be honest about the current limits: reseating is same-price-zone only (a move across zones is a refund plus a new sale, because it's a change of price); repainting the map is venue-wide and immediate, so it moves prices at every event in that building at once; and there's no season-subscription / fixed-subscriber-seat feature yet.

Run a full demo (end to end)

To show the whole loop on the seeded demo data:

  1. Setup (Venue & Layout Setup) — open Teatro Grande, show the sectors, the painted Galleria/Platea/Palco categories, and add or repaint a seat to prove the round-trip (paint persists and shows on reload).
  2. Configure a tier (Tickets & Pricing) — create a best_available tier on the Galleria sector and a user_choice tier on a stalls sector; give each a price per zone, then try to misconfigure one (e.g. a user-choice price map with a painted zone left out — it saves, and the tier flags the gap while checkout refuses those seats — or a best-available hold that names no zone, which is rejected outright) to show the guardrails.
  3. Buy (The Buyer Experience) — pull the availability map, hold two adjacent seats, and check out; then do a best-available buy and show that the seats you were shown are exactly what you get.
  4. Run the night (Box Office) — hold a block for "house", kill one seat, sell a cash ticket at the door, comp one, then scan a ticket and show the seat in the result.

The canonical reference

These guides are the narrative layer. The step-by-step, endpoint-level flows live in the platform's User Journeys document, Journey 19 — Venue & Seating (each guide links to the relevant sub-sections). When a detail here and the journeys ever disagree, the journeys and the code win.