How to reschedule booked tickets
If you have an event that takes place over multiple days, or an event with time slots, then you may find that an event customer wants to reschedule their time or date of entry after their tickets have been issued.
There are two approaches you can take:
- Cancel the existing booking and ask the customer to rebook
- Cancel and rebook the ticket on behalf of the customer
Coconut Tickets aims to keep ticket management as simple as possible, therefore in both cases the existing tickets needs to be cancelled and new tickets need to be issued.
Customers cannot cancel their own tickets.
Approach 1 - Customer creates new booking
Use the "manage bookings" screen to find the customer's existing booking. Change the status of their booking to "cancelled" and click save. The customer will automatically receive a cancellation email and you will then need to go to your online payments account (e.g. PayPal or Stripe) and refund the customer.
Then you can ask the customer to go back to your sales page on Coconut Tickets and make the booking that they now require.
Approach 2 - Organizer creates new booking
This differs from the first approach in that you do everything on behalf of the customer and no new payments are made.
Use the "manage bookings" screen to find the customer's existing booking. Change the status of their booking to "cancelled" and click save. This will automatically email the customer but will not generate a refund from your payment provider.
Next, make a manual booking for the customer using the "new booking" feature that can be found in the top booking menu. Note that a manual booking does not take payment in anyway, it leaves you to decide how payment should be made. Therefore in this case, you don't need to take another payment because you already received the customers money when they made their original booking.
On the last page of the manual booking wizard, tick the box to automatically send the new tickets to your customer via email.
To learn more about how to make manual bookings, please see the link below.
How to decide between the two approaches
By far the simples and most scalable solution is first approach where you ask your customers to make a new booking. However, if you are dealing with VIP customers or you think you the customers not making a new booking then consider the second approach.
The manual rebooking approach only makes sense if the cost of the new tickets matches exactly the cost of the old tickets to be cancelled. Therefore, if the customer doesn't just want to reschedule but wants to add another person or add some of your event merchandise then the only option is to use approach number 1.
Complete event rescheduling
Sometimes you have to postpone an event and after contacting your ticket holders they all agree to come on the new date. In this situation the Coconut Tickets support team can offer you a service to cancel and rebook all the tickets to your new dates without manual effort. Please contact us for more information.