Seating
The three-layer seating model — venues, reusable arrangements, and per-event seating — and how seats, tables, and standing areas fit together.
Seating is where Bookitive does the most work for you: draw a hall once, reuse it for every event in it, and let buyers pick their exact seat while you watch the room fill live. The key to everything is a three-layer model.
Venue → arrangement → event
- Venue — the physical place: name and address. A venue holds any number of arrangements.
- Arrangement — one reusable way to set the room up: "Ball — round tables", "Concert — rows", "Conference — classroom". You draw it once, with zones (color-coded areas like Front, Balcony) instead of prices — because prices belong to events.
- Event seating — when an event applies an arrangement, it receives its own deep copy of the layout, and you map each zone to one of the event's ticket types. From that moment the event's plan is independent: edit the venue's arrangement all you like, live events never move.
This split is what makes annual events painless — the geometry is drawn once, while each year's event brings its own prices, ticket types, and zone mapping.
You can also skip the venue layer entirely and draw a plan directly in one event — right for one-off locations. The editor is identical; you simply lose the reuse.
What a plan is made of
- Floors — one per physical level (Main hall, Balcony). Buyers switch floors with tabs on the public page.
- Sections — drawn areas within a floor, each with its own detailed seat layout; or a single continuous area for simple rooms.
- Seats — individual chairs, in rows or around tables, each with a code (like A‑12 or Table 7, seat 3), a zone/category, and — through the mapping — a ticket type.
- Tables — round, rectangular, oval, or custom shapes with seats around them; buyers see who they're sitting with.
- Standing areas — capacity-based zones on the same map, selling a standing ticket type without individual seats.
- Decorations — stage, walls, doors, pillars, stairs: non-selling shapes that make the map readable.
The one invariant that protects you
Sold seats are protected. The editors refuse destructive edits — deleting, renumbering, changing a table's seat count — on anything that holds a sold or reserved seat. You can always add; you can never silently pull a chair out from under a paying customer.