Guide: Implementing seat selection with Seats.io

The seat assignment is not in a specific Backoffice path. If enabled, you will find it on the booking details page, the manifest, and each sales channel (Box Office, Webshop, and Devices).

What is Seats.io?

Seats.io is a specialised seating chart provider that integrates with Palisis. It allows you to create interactive, visual floor plans so that your customers can select specific seats in real-time during the booking process.

Palisis now integrates directly with Seats.io, allowing you to create interactive seating charts, manage categories, and offer your customers the choice of their preferred seats during the booking process. The Seat Assignment feature transforms your standard booking flow into a visual, interactive experience. By linking a Seats.io workspace to your Palisis account, you can move beyond simple capacity management to precise inventory control.

Key Benefits:

• Enhanced customer experience: Customers can view the layout of your venue or vehicle and choose exactly where they want to sit.

• Tiered pricing: Easily differentiate between "VIP Suite", "Main stand", "Box", “Central” or “Lateral” seating categories with varying price points.

• Automated "best available" logic: Use focal points to automatically assign the best seats to customers who prefer a quick checkout.

• Operational control: View assigned seats directly on your manifest and manage seat changes from the Backoffice.

• Device check-in with seat selection: Customers can select seats during the check-in procedure on handheld devices, including voucher redemptions (available in the Palisis app version 4.65.17 or later).

• OTA seat distribution: Seat assignment data is exposed to OTAs via TourCMS APIs, including voucher-level seat info.

• Seat upgrade: Users can upgrade seats to a different category via a wizard-style flow.

• Orphan seat prevention: Palisis can validate seat selections to avoid leaving single, unsellable seats between occupied seats. This can be configured as a default rule on the product/operation line and fine-tuned for individual departures from the Manifest.

• Aggregated seating info: Seats are displayed in Manifest, Booking Search, and Ticket Dialogue without extra clicks.

• Sync capacity from chart: Automated capacity template generation from a Seats.io chart.

• Disconnect seating chart: Ability to remove seating from an entire OL or a single departure.

The setup is a collaborative process. Usually, our Customer Success team will create your initial seating chart, after which you can manage and create further charts within your dedicated Seats.io workspace.

The first step is to create your physical layout within the Seats.io designer. Typically, your Customer Success Manager will handle the initial chart creation to ensure it meets all technical requirements.

Designing the chart in Seats.io

Please contact our support team or your Customer Success Manager to connect your seats.io chart to Palisis.

With the integration active, you can now build your products within the Palisis Backoffice. During this setup, you will assign the specific Seats.io chart to the corresponding product.

How to set up products with seating charts

To activate seating for specific dates, you must assign the chart to your departures. When you do this, Palisis automatically generates a corresponding event in Seats.io for every departure. Navigate to Prebooking, select the departure, and use the red assignment button to link the chart.

Managing seats assignments for departures

You have full control over how seats are allocated across different sales channels. Once your products are integrated, you can define whether customers choose their own seats or if they are assigned automatically during checkout.

Seat selection set up per channel

After you define how seats are assigned per channel, review the orphan seat prevention settings. These settings help prevent customers or staff from leaving isolated single seats that are difficult to sell later. Configure the default behaviour on the product/operation line, then adjust it for a specific departure from the Manifest when operational needs require it.

Configuring orphan seat prevention

After a booking is finalized, you can view and manage seat assignments directly within the Palisis Backoffice. This information is available in two primary locations:

• Booking details: For individual seat modifications or viewing.

• The Manifest: For a comprehensive overview of all seated passengers.

Managing bookings for seating chart products

Below are the primary actions you can take to manage your bookings and departures:

Managing seats assignements

How to change the seating chart for a specific departure

Managing seat categories and channel allocations for specific departures

To ensure your bookings sync correctly, each Palisis account requires its own unique seating chart. Using the same seating chart across multiple accounts can cause technical conflicts. If you manage more than one account, please create a dedicated seating chart for each one rather than reusing an existing layout.

Why this matters:

• Prevent overbooking: Reusing a chart can lead to synchronization errors.

• Accurate reporting: Unique charts ensure that availability is tracked correctly for each specific account.

Any modification made within the Seats.io designer (such as renaming a row, moving a focal point, or changing a seat category) is not live until it is published. You must click the 'Publish' button in Seats.io before these updates will be reflected in your Palisis Box Office, Webshop, or mobile devices.

Auto-Sync for categories: Linking or unlinking Palisis categories triggers an automatic publish. No manual action is needed to update your category mapping.

Every departure in Palisis requires a corresponding "Event" in Seats.io to act as a template. The first time you link a departure, you may encounter the "Default template not Found" alert.

• The solution: Simply copy the exact template name provided in the Palisis alert, navigate to your Seats.io dashboard, and rename your event to match that string exactly. This establishes the link between the two systems.

  

  

Consistency between the two platforms is vital for pricing accuracy:

• Once a seat category is successfully mapped to a chart, the status in Palisis must display a green tick.

• Validation errors: If you have "stray" seats in Seats.io that are not assigned to a category, the system will return a validation error. Ensure every seat on your chart is assigned to a category that exists in Palisis.

When a customer starts a booking, the system places a temporary hold on those seats.

• If the booking is not completed within the timeout period (typically 45 minutes), the seats are automatically released back into general inventory.

• This prevents "double-booking" while a customer is entering their payment details.

• If you try to book the best seats but enough bookings without seat selection fill the seating, you cannot book the best seats. However, you can select seats on the chart or book without seat selection.

You can reassign a customer to a different seat via the Backoffice Manifest; however, the new seat must belong to the same price category as the original booking.

• If you wish to move a customer to a higher-priced category (e.g., from Lateral to VIP), you must handle the price difference separately or perform a refund and re-booking to maintain financial integrity.

The system will now block payment on devices if not all seats have been assigned when seat selection is required.