Tickets: Add the ability to handle secondary event tickets

[hideandgeek404]

Components / Tools

CampTix

Description

Each event generally has multiple ticket types. General admission is only the tip of the iceberg and it would be great if we were able to have secondary ticket types that we could use to handle tickets for such events as Contributor Day, workshops, additional activities and the like.

Currently these are generally handled by having a supplementary spreadsheet on the side that records these other registrations or sales and this means that the connections between tickets are brittle. For example, to be able to attend Contributor Day at WCEU you must have a general admission ticket of some sort. If a general admission ticket is then cancelled or transferred (companies may have bought 10 attendee tickets under their company name) then the spreadsheets need to be updated manually to match, however, this is not always obvious that this has taken place and so attendees are often left in a state of limbo. Likewise, we may also find that attendee tickets have been cancelled, but the contributor days attendance is still confirmed.

The suggestion here is to have additional ticket types for other events, these custom ticket types should be able to be created by the organising team and should, at the very least, have the option to be attributed to the general admission tickets so that cancelling the main ticket should cancel any other attributed ticket. This should be optional, as there may be events that can be ticketed that don't rely upon the admission ticket being bought. Unlikely, but possible.

Stakeholders

Event Organisers, Attendees, Sponsors

How does this new feature contribute to the goals

Think through it, what is the ultimate goal you hope this feature will achieve?
Ticket management should be much easier for anything that isn't a general admission ticket. Building the relationship between GA tickets and add-ons means that management by the organisers becomes much easier, catering numbers are more accurate for events, attendees have a better experience and companies who spend on tickets in bulk will have less confusion when it comes to tickets being transferred.

Are there other more intuitive alternative solutions? Not really, unless we implement an external ticket management suite.

Is this a feature that people need? Yes. The last few WCEU that I have attended have had confusion around ticketing for extra events, if we were able to ticket workshops, for example, this would free up a lot of volunteers to help in other areas. Furthermore, attendees would have a better experience managing their tickets and can schedule their day around their tickets better.

Can it truly achieve your desired outcomes? Absolutely, this would be a simple enough change to begin with that would have a huge impact and would be a stepping stone to the next stage, but even having the multiple ticket types would hit a landmark.

Acceptance Criteria

Provide a detailed explanation or definition of what constitutes fulfilling this feature discussion/request/proposal. If possible, outline it in bullet points.

1. Implement secondary ticket types

• Allow organisers to create multiple ticket types
• Allow organisers to link these to another ticket type, e.g. make the secondary ticket dependant upon the General Admission ticket being valid.
• If a dependant ticket, e.g. general admission, ticket is cancelled, then all secondary tickets should be cancelled too
• If a dependant ticket changes ownership, so should the secondary ticket

Priority

It would be good to have this implemented for WC Asia in February 2025. That is the next flagship event, but if we can get it implemented sooner then that would also be great for smaller WC

[dd32]

The suggestion here is to have additional ticket types for other events, these custom ticket types should be able to be created by the organising team and should, at the very least, have the option to be attributed to the general admission tickets

I can see this also being useful for other dependent use-cases too, for example a parent being able to purchase a ticket for $30 and attach a $15 under-18 ticket to their purchase for example.

That's making an assumption that these would be 'purchased' (could be free) at booking time though, but things like Workshops and Contributor day tickets are obviously something that might not be part of the regular ticket purchase experience.
It might be that these are things that need to be added/removed at will after booking, from the edit-ticket interface, which is rather limited and not at all easy for some people to get back to (Might be worth adding a way for someone to request an email with a link to their additional tickets interface)

I'd suggest that at first, my initial mention above of child-tickets would be discarded, and this focus purely on ticketing for additional capacity-constrained events.

[ciudadanoB]

I love @hideandgeek404 idea, and as a first step towards a better handling of tickets, I'd love to see the implementation.

Just one more thing I would like to have if possible at some point: to assign a ticket type (and even a coupon) an admin-flag that would be automatically enabled when purchased/used. This way in the attendee list and when exporting, we could quickly see if that person has an admin-flag (contributor-day, workshop-seo, child-ticket, coupon-sponsor) and then it would be easier to filter.

[pkevan]

Thanks for logging the suggestion @hideandgeek404 - while it appears simple 😄 there are quite a few pieces we would need to consider, some of which is already solved.

@renintw and I are planning to get together to discuss this further, and we will update this issue as things progress.

[hideandgeek404]

Thanks, @pkevan. I completely understand the complexities involved and the impact it has on other areas. The current system is deep-rooted like much of the WordCamp infrastructure so I know there are threads that, once pulled, will keep tugging elsewhere.

Please let me know if there is anything you need from me. I also have access to the current organising team for WCEU 25 too who I have invited to join us in the conversation here to add some clarity.

As always, any work you do here is appreciated.

[pkevan]

@renintw and I got together to discuss some options here:

• making users log-in would make linking tickets easier
• allow only a secondary tickets with a purchased ticket
• create an account type section, which allows editing of ticket and access to secondary ticket

some questions came out of this also:

• should editing/cancelling a main ticket cause the link to a secondary ticket invalid?
• can we link profile fields to purchase field
• how are organisers intending to use/track these tickets

[malgrauk]

should editing/cancelling a main ticket cause the link to a secondary ticket invalid?

I would say in all scenarios I can think of this being used - Yes - as in theory, it shouldn't be possible to have a Contributor Day ticket (supplementary) without an event ticket (primary)

With the comment from Juan above on the tags, this would work well with #1351 as if someone was to register for the secondary ticket item, we could send that information to our mailing system (Brevo) so that we have an updated list of everyone ready to send a bulk email / messaging about the event, etc.