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Christopher Berry
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June 3, 2013 at 11:11 am
I have a question about overbooking — we’re a government agency and several times a month we offer free tours to the public, and we use EE to handle the registration. The tours are extremely popular and when registration opens up at 8 a.m. on the first Monday of the month, the slots are typically filled within two to three minutes.
We’re ending up with massive overbooking on some of these events, I’m assuming because so many people are registering at once. One of our July events is now at 208 people for an event with 110 slots. We used to let people reserve 6 seats; we dropped it to 4 but it hasn’t seemed to help. In practice, we haven’t had a problem (yet) because our actual capacity is 150 and we usually have cancellations and no-shows.
Is there something that can be done within EE to prevent this or at least minimize it (obviously we could do a workaround of fewer slots available to begin with, but I’d like to avoid that if possible)?
Thanks,
Chris Berry, Port of Long Beach
Wordpress 3.5.1, EE 3.1.30.7P – ticketing is the only EE addon, I think; upgraded a couple months ago but this problem predates the upgrade; http://polb100.com/registration is our registration page.
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Garth
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June 3, 2013 at 12:27 pm
Hi Christopher,
How are you today?
Are all the registration date timestamps literally within the same minute and/or seconds so that Event Espresso can’t keep up with all the requests at the same time?
I’d recommend upgrading Event Espresso to a newer version to see if that helps. I just wonder if there is a bug in that version that doesn’t check for registration limits quickly enough. Do the registration limit notifications eventually kick in and block people from registering?
I haven’t see this before (other support staff might have), so I’ll ask around.
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Garth
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June 3, 2013 at 12:35 pm
I will add though that currently in Event Espresso 3 the registration availability is checked when someone loads a registration page (or earlier), but if they can access the registration page with the valid form then they can register (even if the event is full).
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Christopher Berry
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June 3, 2013 at 12:42 pm
I suspect that is what is happening. The system does eventually switch over to the waitlist event; today it switched over at 8:06. The vast majority of the reservations happened between 8:00 and 8:02, with only 5 reservations between 8:03 and 8:06. I would bet that those last 5 are people whose registration page was already open, and the others just all came in more or less simultaneously. There’s no seconds on the timestamp, unfortunately, at least not in the normal view, and the registration time doesn’t appear in the Excel export.
I’m not sure what can be done here, other than just cutting down our slots, but any advice would be welcome. I don’t know if anyone else has had this problem with a paid or unpaid event but hopefully they’ll weigh in.
Thanks —
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Garth
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June 4, 2013 at 11:44 am
Ya, we’re going to raise this issue again with our development team. I’d like to see if others have comments as well.
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Christopher Berry
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June 19, 2013 at 4:21 pm
Garth, just wanted to bump this and see if your development team has had any ideas. Thanks —
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Dean
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June 20, 2013 at 2:26 am
Hi Christopher,
The developers definitely took this on board and I believe are looking to incorporate a system into the next major version of Event Espresso (4.X). However that may take some time. We are discussing on how we can incorporate this into 3.1X but no decision has been made as yet.
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Christopher Berry
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June 20, 2013 at 10:38 am
Thanks, Dean — in the short term I can work around it by reducing the number of available seats somewhat, but knowing you are working on a long-term solution is a relief —
Chris
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Dean
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June 21, 2013 at 2:44 am
Hi Chris,
No problem, we are always looking to improve the plugin so constructive feedback like this is very helpful to us.
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