Event planning comes in all shapes and sizes. You could be a corporate event organizer or you could be organizing summer camps or funfairs. There are movie screenings, music concerts, performance shows like open mics or poetry slams and standup comedy.

These days, you can easily organize events. Everyone is looking for cultural experiences to indulge in and there is a pool of consumers ready to sign up.

The most common thing for organizers of public events to do is to create an event page on Facebook, link it to a third party for ticket sales and bookings, and share and promote the page as much as possible. But if you’re in it for the long-term, there is an alternative you might want to consider.

Instead of using third-party ticketing platforms, you can create your own website, and for under $200 a year, turn it into a booking platform. Customers won’t have to leave your website when they want to book a ticket or reserve a space for free events.

You can do this using the Booking & Appointment plugin for WooCommerce. (If you want to know more about WooCommerce, go here).

With this plugin, you can turn a simple WordPress website into a booking platform, so that ticketed or free, you could manage all your events from one portal, and automate booking management.

In this article, we will highlight specific features of the Booking plugin which will help you easily organize your events.

Managing Varying Tickets

Say you are organizing a music concert, or a performance show, or holding a movie screening. Typically, events like these have different, or varying types of tickets depending on the seating arrangement.

Say there are 100 tickets in total, with 25 of them being gold, 25 silver, and 50 bronze level tickets. You can change settings so that customers will know how many and which types of tickets are available.

Creating a ‘variable’ product will give you control over the different ‘variations’ of the same product. For instance, if you only want to put the ‘silver’ category of tickets on sale, you can add a price just for that.

Then, in the booking box, go to availability and set the maximum number of bookings for a particular day, which in our example, would be 100.

Set Up Special Prices for Weekdays/Dates

Often, the same show or event is held across multiple dates, days, and venues and charged differently based on those details. You can easily manage that with the booking plugin.

When you set up a product, you need to decide on one price. Then, when you enable booking, you will get the option to pick different additional prices.

You can change prices by day, or by timeslots. You know how movies cost less before 4 pm, and more afterwords. This is basically how it’s done. It’s a one-time setup, which would generally come right after your scheduling for a period of time is in.

Handling Cancelled Bookings

It’s an event organizer’s worst nightmare – people not showing up. If your booking system is not in place, canceled bookings can also turn into a logistical nightmare.

The booking plugin has the capability to ensure that once orders are canceled by the customer, it is reflected in the front-end and is shown as available to the front-end users.

So, if a particular show was showing sold out before cancellation, tickets will show as available after a cancellation is recorded. Sweet, right?

Additionally, you can also manually trash the orders, if you want to keep that option open. This is more common in smaller events, which are often free and require an RSVP.

Timezone Conversion

As you scale and start to organize bigger events, chances are that you will be targeting a global audience. Say a major sports league, or a music concert headlined by a global artist. Such events are often hosted in one time zone but are viewed in another.

If the event is being live-streamed, it would help customers to know when it is being held in their local time. If they want to plan their traveling schedules to the venue, it would help to know the same. Especially in a country like the United States, where local timezones differ vastly, this plugin could add a nice touch to your web presence.

This is how it will look on the from end, to the customer.

Remind ’em Right

If your event can be booked months in advance, some customers tend to forget about it. To ensure you have a proper headcount of those coming and be connected with the customer, you can set up both reminder emails and reminder text messages at a particular time before the event is about to take place.

You can then customize settings as to whether the reminders should be automatic or manual and how much time before the booking they should be sent – which would vary if you have more than one event up on the website to be booked.

Deposits and Payments

When it comes to more expensive tickets and events, event organizers will often have the option to reserve a seat with a deposit amount and then pay the full amount later. It is common practice in the hospitality industry, but you can always use this strategy in events as well.

This is where the Deposits add-on that comes with the Booking plugin comes into play. It allows you to do just that. Once you install the add-on, an option will automatically appear in the booking box on the product page.

This deposit can either be a flat amount or a percentage of the price. For events, it is prudent to have a flat amount if all your tickets cost the same, and a percentage if you have varying ticket prices.

If there are customers who want to pay the full amount while booking, there is an option for that as well.

Printable Tickets

Another add-on that would help you to easily organize your events and do so smoothly, is the printable tickets add-on. This allows your website to email tickets to the customer, so they have a confirmation of their reservation and booking.

Conclusion

There are many ways to easily organize events and make the process of selling tickets easy and fun. If you want to set up the next big company, you have to start thinking like one, marketing it extensively is not enough. Expand the boundaries of your business to handle certain functions within it.

Booking is a crucial aspect of any event organization activity, and the sooner you bring it into your fold, the faster you can build a customer base for yourself rather than rely on third parties.