Tech Content
8 minutes

With almost 20 years of ticketing experience, Softjourn has a long history of creating powerful venue mapping and seat picking tools for our clients. Over that time, we’ve watched different ticketing platforms struggle to meet audience demands when it came to describing what an event would look like. 

One current trend focuses on building interactive venue maps, while also providing an easy-to-use seat picking tool. Customers expect a lot of flash—cool interfaces and complex functionalities that work seamlessly. This can be a tall order for many ticketing platforms! 

Traditionally, ticketing vendors who needed to update their venue mapping and seat picking tools either kept what they had because they couldn’t afford to upgrade, or integrated with a third-party service that typically charged by the seat. Depending on the type of events their customers organized, this could be an expensive solution.

With Softjourn’s experience and understanding of the ticketing industry, we developed a third option that would serve those stuck between the traditional choices.

Update or Stagnate?

Patrons expect to choose their seat when purchasing an event ticket. They want a clearly defined venue map that provides an idea of what the show will look like from that vantage point. 

At the same time, event managers need to be able to quickly create venue maps that accurately represent the stage or stadium where their event takes place. They also need to offer best seat selection and a simple picking method to their customers, along with presenting clear identifiers on location, pricing, and other information.

Making something easy for the customer is not always easily achieved and when combined with higher-level functionality, that can quickly get expensive. This presents a challenge for ticketing platforms that serve niche audiences on a tight budget.

venue mapping

And then there are ticketing platforms whose target clients are large venues like stadiums. These platforms sell a high volume of seats per month. A subscription model can be expensive in the long run if certain agreements don’t work for everyone involved in the ticketing process. 

As in all of our consulting work, Softjourn prides itself on recommending the best solution for all of our clients. This means doing what’s right for the client: it could be better for one client to upgrade their existing in-house tool, another client should keep their existing tool as is, while a third should integrate to a subscription service, or a fourth would be best served by licensing our venue mapping/seat picking tool.

We have developed our venue mapping/seat picking tool with the knowledge that one choice doesn’t fit all situations. For those ticketing platforms that cannot afford an upgrade but don’t want a subscription model, Softjourn’s tool is here.

The Softjourn Solution

Softjourn has developed a venue mapping tool (currently in beta!) with all the bells and whistles that event managers and patrons could want. This provides an up-to-date solution for ticketing platforms with a variety of needs, but the true differentiator is the ability to control inventory via self-hosting coupled with a license model. 

When it Makes Sense to Self-Host

With Softjourn’s tool, ticketing platforms maintain control and management of their ticketing inventory and of the tool itself, via hosting both in the same manner that they host their ticketing platform.

When does it make sense to self-host? Here are some things to think about:

  • No connectivity issues. When your server is up, the tool and the inventory remain up. You don’t have to worry about someone else’s servers going down.

  • Greater performance. Third party services are hosting ticket sales for many, many events. High-volume ticket sales for one event can inadvertently slow down sales for your events. You only have to worry about your inventory, and when an enhancement is needed to improve performance, you don’t need to wait for the third party service to implement changes. You can do it yourself.

  • Better security. Self hosting means you aren’t opening up your inventory to a third party. You're not inadvertently sharing information about your events or seating operations. All API connections between the primary and reserved seating systems are kept private.

  • More reliability. All components for the venue mapping tool remain within the same operations architecture, disaster recovery, and DevOps management.

What Our Tool Offers

From developing a floor plan to fit a venue’s exact size and shape, to defining general admission and VIP reserved seating, our white label tool gives you powerful venue mapping functionality that can be easily integrated to your current platform. Designing layouts for many types of venues is boiled down to three simple steps. 

Event managers can be assured that their venues are accurately represented, with tools like assigned seat attributes, curving, and skewing, and the ability to upload images like stage or aisles. Check out this visual walkthrough of our venue mapping tool for more information.

Ticketing can include general admission, reserved seating, or a mix of the two. Creating and attaching different types of tickets to each row, seat, or section is as simple as a click, and existing ticket types can be imported via API. 

Patrons can focus on choosing a seat instead of being frustrated with a difficult UI. They can select tickets with a single mouse click, which then appear in their cart for easy purchase. Along with a payment timer, our venue mapping tool includes a real-time map refresh to avoid confusion. This is especially important for high-demand events.

Altogether, this gives ticketing platforms the flexibility and control they need to make their customers happy and sell lots of tickets.

Ready to Try?

Our venue mapping tool can help you sell out events and inspire repeat customers, creating a brand that event managers and patrons will know and love. Your customers get the cool interface and flashy functionality they want, and you get to sell more tickets without breaking your budget. 

Want to learn more about our venue mapping tool? Here’s a visual walkthrough.

Ready to go for a test drive? Drop a line to sales@softjourn.com with your name, contact information, and the best time of day to reach out so we can get the ball rolling on making you a beta client.

We will get back to you quickly so we can get your new venue mapping tool set up!

Softjourn is a global technology services provider focused on working with ticketing services. After almost 20 years, we have a unique understanding about the kind of ticketing solutions that clients want. With us, they don’t waste time explaining a box office app, why offline mode is important, or how patrons work. Because of our experience, we can get up to speed quicker and our client’s new ticketing service functionality gets to market faster. 

We become a trusted partner by proactively collaborating on all design, build out, and deployment. Contact us to give life to your ideas!