Help needed regarding venue seating.

A firend of my family has recently started a business that revolves aroud a 6,000 seat outdoor facility that can host concerts and other events. Currently, he is just selling open seating tickets where tickets get you in the gate and then you sit where you want.

He is looking to get a software package that would let him sell specific seats. For example, someone would call and ask for 5 tickets and the computer would pull up all of the blocks of 5 continuous tickets. This would e simliar to online ball game ticket sales.

My question is, does anyone know of a very basic freeware or low cost application like this? All of the ones I have seen are very expensive custom applications. If nothing is available, does this sound like something that could be rigged up in Excel or Access?

Thanks,
Robert

We are currently updating our ticketing system, but all of the options we are looking at are big $. I don't know of any simple ones. The advantage of real ticketing software is you can replace lost tickets, look up accounts, keep track of patrons. Say "Joe" wants the same seat as last time, it is much quicker to do with real software.

I know, but this person is only looking for basic functionality. He wants to be able to have people call up and request 5 tickets and the computer will tell him if he has a group of 5 available. Money is really the limiting factor here.

Robert,

From my experience there is no such thing as "basic" ticketing software. It's all expensive and from what I've seen even some of the expensive suites expect the user to bring up an image of the venue and manually look for blocks of seats. Every time we consider bringing ticketing in-house we do a cost analysis and end up sourcing.

-F