Ghini’s guide to Ticket Sanity

I've been dealing with tickets a long time. I used to run a theme camp that had over 100 people in it, and sometimes I would be buying, selling and trading up to 30 tickets during the weeks before an event. Then I joined leadership, and I became one of the people who's managing ticketing issues for 2000+ people. So here's my wisdom from 13 years of doing this.

Whitelist the Ticket Email

In your email, whitelist tickets@flashpointart.org so that emails never go to spam. This page has some good help for some of the major email services: http://onlinegroups.net/blog/2014/02/25/how-to-whitelist-an-email-address/

SAVE YOUR TICKETS

Don't just let that PDF sit in an email. You're going to delete it, or lose it. Download that PDF and save the file somewhere like Dropbox or Google Drive where you can get to it later.

EMAIL YOURSELF YOUR TICKETS

Yeah, I know you just got an email with them. You're going to lose it or delete it remember? So email yourself a copy of that PDF. Use an easy to search for subject like "Alchemy backup tickets" so you can search for it later. Got a second email? Send it there. Send it to your work email.

SPLIT YOUR TICKETS

You bought four tickets. You are not going to Alchemy four times. So let's split them up now, so you don't have to figure it out later.

On a mac, this is easy.

Open the PDF with Preview. Make sure under the View menu that “Thumbnails” is selected. Click and drag each thumbnail to the desktop. Rename the PDFs

On a PC, it's not too hard either.

Use Google Chrome to open the PDF Click the print icon in the upper right corner. For the Destination, chenge it to "Save as PDF" Under Pages enter 1 Click save Repeat, saving pages 2, 3 and 4

NAME THINGS SMARTLY

Lets say you bought 4 tickets on Order 15254447. Save that original PDF in Google Drive as Order15254447-original.pdf

Split it into 4 PDFs named:

Order15254447-1.pdf

Order15254447-2.pdf

Order15254447-3.pdf

Order15254447-4.pdf

The first ticket is for yourself, so name it Order15254447-me.pdf

Ticket 2 is for your roommate Tim, so name it Order15254447-2-Tim.pdf

Ticket 3 is for your partner Chris, so name it Order15254447-3-Chris.pdf

Ticket 4 is for your friend Nat, so name it Order15254447-4-Nate.pdf

Three people owe you money for tickets. When Tim pays you for his ticket, change the file name to Order15254447-2-Tim-PAID.pdf and send it to him. Keep a copy in your Google Drive so that when Tim loses his ticket, you can send it to him again.

PRINT YOUR TICKETS

Yes, the gate can read barcodes off a phone. Your phones battery will die. You will lose your phone. You will have no signal at the gate to download the PDF to your phone. The gate computers may crash.

If you have a printed ticket, none of those things will matter. If the gate computers are down and we have to look up tickets by hand, having a paper copy will make it very easy to scan them later when the system is back up.