Open Forum

I am experiencing a new challenge regarding capacity limitations and hoping someone may have a suggestion on what I can do.
We are hosting a two-day conference in November. The total capacity of our event space at any given time is 1,000.  We offer three admissions items for attendees to choose from:

1. Two-Day Conference
2. One-Day Conference (Tuesday)
3. One-Day Conference (Wednesday)

We typically only sell a small handful of One-Day passes, however, this year we have had to raise our registration prices quite a bit and we believe our guests may be more inclined than they have in the past to purchase a One-Day pass. We anticipate that those purchasing a One-Day pass will be more likely to select to attend on Wednesday, as that is when we are having a high-profile keynote. This poses a problem for setting capacity limitations.

• If we set the capacity limit at the event level, then every person who selects a One-Day pass removes the ability for someone else to attend the opposite day. For example, if we have an event capacity of 1,000 and 300 people select to attend only on Wednesday, then we will only be able to reach 700 maximum on Tuesday through the combined One-Day (Tuesday) and Two-Day pass sales.
• If we set the capacity on the admission item level, then we will have to guess how many people will want a One-Day pass vs a Two-Day pass. For example, 750 capacity for the Two-Day pass and 250 for each One-Day pass. The problem is that we have no idea if this is a reasonable distribution.

In reality, we need the ability to put capacity limits on the day, rather than the event, admission item, or registration type. But as far as I'm aware, that doesn't exist. If anyone has any suggestions or creative workarounds I could try that doesn't make registration overly complicated for the user, I'm all ears. I know I could just keep an eye on our registration totals and adjust the capacities manually, but I would rather avoid that.

#Registration
#Creating/ManagingEvents

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Erin Widdicombe
Registration Manager for Professional Education
Indiana Youth Institutes
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I have a similar problem but on a smaller scale:

We host training events that consist of 4 days (set up as sessions). Guests can sign up for 1, 2, 3 or all 4 days. Session capacity is set to 8 for each day.

If we have eight different people each day that would be a 32-person event capacity, but if we have the same 8 people sign up for all 4 days, capacity could be set at 8.  It is a guessing game.

This does affect the accepted and waitlist situation.

If capacity is set at 16 and then 12 people fill in all 4 days, that leaves 4 people who are accepted for the event, but waitlisted for the sessions. They still get all the event emails and have shown up at sessions believing they were in the class, when in truth they were waitlisted for the session. Would love that if all 4 sessions are full, then it turns on the waitlist for the event.

Agree that we need the ability/option to have capacity limits from each day or session and that those capacities trigger the waitlist for the event.  

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Ellen White
Outreach and Training Specialist
Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc.United States
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Oof, yeah, you're right. That's tricky. According to this help document, if you set capacities on included sessions and any of the included sessions associated with a single admission item reaches capacity, it will restrict anyone from selecting that admission item. However, that would require you to set up every possible combination of days as admission items, which I believe adds up to 15 different options (Monday Only, Tuesday/Wednesday, Monday/Tuesday/Thursday, etc etc...). 

If the same capability was applied to optional sessions, you could achieve about 90% of what you're wanting to do. But alas...

I just don't see any way to do this automatically. We have a similar, albeit a much simplier situation.

Session A and Session B can not have any more than 100 people combined.

We set capacity to 50 for each session and will keep an eye changing the lowering and raising the capacity of each as need.

Manual may be the only way.  Be sure to use planner alerts letting you know when you are at 90% or 95% full.