Seating plans

A seating plan turns a flat capacity into a real map of your room — numbered seats people can choose for themselves. You draw the plan once for a venue, reuse it across events, and decide per event which ticket types are sold in which part of the room.

1. Design your seating plan

A plan belongs to a location, so set your venue up first (see Create your first event for where Locations live). Then go to Locations → (your venue) → Seating plans → New plan to open the visual editor.

In the editor you build the room out of zones:

• A seated zone holds rows of numbered seats — for a hall with assigned seats.
• A standing zone has no seats, just a capacity — for a pit, dance floor or standing area.

For a seated zone, add rows, then seats along each row. When you draw a row, the numbering helper pre-fills the seat numbers for you:

• Start number — the first seat's number.
• Scheme — Sequential (1, 2, 3…), Even (2, 4, 6…) or Odd (1, 3, 5…), the typical European left/right split.
• Direction — left → right or right → left.

A few finishing touches:

• Set a row's Rotation to angle it toward the stage so curved seating looks right.
• Drop a Podium to mark the stage, plus Obstacles (pillars, sound desk) and Labels (entrances, "Bar") so buyers can orient themselves.

When the room looks right, click Save. The plan is now reusable on any event at that venue.

Editing a plan after sales have started

You can keep refining a plan at any time — rearrange, rename and add seats freely. The one rule: seats that are already sold or held are locked, so an existing ticket can never lose its seat. If you try to save a structural change to a plan that has sold seats, Cleartix asks you to save a copy instead — do that for a big redesign, then attach the new plan to future events.

2. Set it up for an event

Open Events → (your event) → Seating. Pick a plan from the list — it must be one of the plans that belong to the event's venue, so make sure the event has the right location set.

Then fill in the ticket type × zone matrix: tick which ticket types are sold in which zones. The model is simple — the price stays on the ticket type (you still manage prices under Ticket types); a zone just decides which types are offered there. A zone can offer one type (e.g. only "Seated — €25") or several (e.g. "Standard" and "Reduced" in the same zone). Click Save.

3. What buyers see

On a seated event, the buyer clicks Choose seats and gets your map. They click the seats they want — taken seats are greyed out and can't be selected. If a zone offers more than one ticket type, they pick the type for each seat. Their chosen seats are held for 15 minutes while they go through checkout, so nobody else can grab them mid-purchase; if checkout isn't finished in time the seats are released back to the map.

Every seat carries its label — zone, row and number — all the way through. The confirmation, the ticket and the scanner all show it as, for example, Parterre · Row A · 3, so your door staff know exactly where each guest sits. For the full buyer's-eye view of the rest of the flow, see The checkout experience.