Visitor attractions
Time slots for your museum or exhibition
Sell tickets per hour, with a fixed number of places per slot. Set up a month of time slots in twenty minutes, without selling the same place twice.
· 3 min read
On a rainy Sunday everyone turns up at 2 pm. The galleries fill up, the guide can't get a group together and the queue at the till keeps growing. Time slots spread that crowd: your visitor picks an hour in advance, and per hour you sell no more places than your rooms can take.
What a time slot is
A time slot is one moment with a maximum number of places: "Saturday 2.00 – 3.30 pm, twenty places". Each slot stands on its own. If the 2 pm slot is full, your visitor can still choose 3 pm.
Capacity is not the number of people your building holds, but the number you want to sell per slot. Like to keep five places free for walk-ins? Set the capacity five lower.
When you need them
- Your exhibition or your hall is physically limited.
- A guide can only take one group at a time.
- You want to avoid eighty people coming in at once at 11 am.
If you sell ordinary day tickets and people walk in and out freely, you don't need time slots: an ordinary admission ticket will do.
A month of time slots in twenty minutes
You don't create time slots one by one, but with a generator:
- Go to Sales → Time slots and click Create time slots.
- Choose the product and the location.
- Choose the period and the days of the week.
- Enter the first and the last start, how many minutes apart the slots start, how long a slot lasts and how many places each slot has.
- Leave Stay within the opening hours of the venue switched on: then no slot falls on your closing day and no slot ends after closing time.
An example: in October, Tuesday to Sunday, every hour from 10 am to 4 pm, an hour and a half long, twenty places. You enter that once. The generator never touches existing slots, so you can run it again later to add a month, a day or an extra hour, without a single sold ticket disappearing.
Every field is explained in the manual under Time slots.
What your visitor sees
In the ticket shop your visitor first picks a day and then an hour, with the number of free places shown. The calendar opens on the next day with free places. A full slot stays visible but cannot be chosen, and a slot closes online at its start time: latecomers go to the desk, where you decide whether there is still room.
No double sales, not even at the desk
On a busy day you sell online and at the till at the same time. Two things make sure the last place is sold only once:
- a slot's counter is checked and increased in a single step;
- during checkout the chosen places are held for ten minutes. If your visitor drops out, they become free again by themselves.
A full slot no longer sells anywhere: not online and not at the desk till.
Closing, cancelling and adjusting capacity
Each slot has four buttons. Capacity changes the number of places of one slot. Close stops sales, but people who already booked still come. Cancel says the moment does not take place and immediately shows how many people you need to notify. Reopen undoes either.
At the door
At the entrance you scan the tickets with the scanning app. If a ticket belongs to another time slot, the app shows a warning instead of Valid: you see it straight away, and you decide whether that visitor may come in anyway. Also read how to scan tickets at the door, even without a network.
What it costs
Time slots are part of every plan, the free one included. For a visitor attraction that sells all year round, Start (€9.00 a month, up to 3,000 paid tickets a year) or Growth (€29.00 a month, unlimited tickets) fit well. There is never an amount per ticket on top. Compare the plans on the pricing page, or see what Passavo does for visitor attractions.
