Feature Focus: Calendar and Time-slot Bookings

Make selling regular events a breeze with LIVE IT's easy to set-up and customer friendly booking platform.

If you have a regular or recurring event, managing booking pages can be a pain. You can find yourself creating hundreds of pages for every possible date and time available, and needing to make one change means updating every single one.

With LIVE IT's new calendar and time-slot system, you can manage a recurring event from one booking page, easily set up and modify availability of tickets on dates and timeslots, all presented to the customer on a user-friendly buying flow.

Read on to learn more...

How do calendar and time-slot events work?

When setting up an event, you'll come to the dates section, and you'll be asked if you want to set up a single event, or a recurring one. Choose recurring to enable calendar and time-slot bookings.

Set your on and off-sale windows (e.g. when tickets for dates become available) and proceed setting up your event normally, including ticket types. Note that when setting up ticket types, the "quantity available' will determine how many of that ticket is available in each timeslot. Ticket groups will work as normal, too.

Now, it's time to set up your time slot inventory. Click "create time slots" in the top right to get started. There's a few bits here, so we'll go through them one by one.

Create slots starting on/ending on - use this to choose which dates you're creating time-slots for.

On these days of the week - self-explanatory. You could use this to have different tickets available (and hence different pricing) on different days.

Sales limit for each time slot - self-explanatory - note that this will override any individual ticket quantity limits set when creating Ticket Types.

Status - works the same as on Ticket Types. You'll almost always want this set to available, unless you want to take this entire set of slots off-sale

Slot Times - You can create as many slots as you'd like in a day. Make sure to add at least one here by clicking "add slot". If you create only one slot, this will be automatically selected for the customer when they select the date. If you do not want the end time of a slot to be displayed, you can choose so on the dates page.

Select tickets - Checkboxes enable a ticket for this set of timeslots. You can use this with the dates/day selectors to have different tickets or prices available.

Let's take a look at an example set up:

And now let's see how that's presented to the customer:

Making changes and edits to existing timeslots is as easy as creating them. Go back to the Ticket Timeslot Inventory page and you'll be presented with a calendar view. Click on a day to open the available timeslots underneath the calendar, click edit to adjust ticket availability and allocations for an individual slot. Alternatively, click "manage timeslots" in the top right of the Ticket Timeslot Inventory page to edit timeslots in bulk, in the same way you set them up.

To get an overview of sales, use the Ticket Timeslot Inventory page to get a glance of how many tickets are sold for any given day and timeslot. Use the Booking Calendar for a list of bookings for any given timeslot. Or use "download all timeslot data" to get a csv with a breakdown of sales by ticket group, by timeslot.

Best Practices

If you have lots of ticket types, we heavily recommend making use of Ticket Groups to keep your tickets organised (both in the backend for your sake and the frontend for the customers sake!)

Ensure the information on your ticket types (ticket name, description etc) makes sense for the timeslots that they are available in. E.g. if you have an evening timeslot with different entry information, create a separate ticket type for use in those slots.

You can in theory, use a timeslot event page forever. Just keep in mind that you will need to periodically create new timeslots as you come to the end of the slots you made previously.

Get Started

Calendar and Time-slot Bookings will soon be enabled by default for all LIVE IT organisers, but if you would like to have this available now, drop us an email at support@liveit.io and we'll set you up.