From Nick Gale (Lace Market Theatre)

I met with Patrick and James, the two directors of Savoy Systems, 4 years ago and was impressed with their willingness to listen to our requirements and Patrick’s approach to customer service and support.

We now run our box office and membership and patron database in Oscar. Members’ discounts are handled automatically and members can book online and get their membership discounts. You can also sell gift vouchers and if you want to, use it as a bar and FOH retail system.

It is a complete box office solution with in-house and online booking. My main criteria for selecting a system for the LMT included:

• Integrated in-house and online – no need to transfer online sales to an in-house system
• Integrated Chip and PIN – minimal paperwork reconciling takings, it’s a Chip and PIN reader connected to the PC
• Automatic membership and season ticket discounts – Members can book online and get any discount you offer and it even checks their membership is current. It can easily handle season ticket discounts and one-off special offers.
• Marketing – a single patron database is worth a lot of money! Patron data capture was very important to us.
• Remote management – I can run Oscar at home over a VPN and it’s almost as fast as being in the theatre – essential for running reports, etc

We are now in year three of running Oscar and our box office revenue has never been higher, neither has our playbill print run! Highly recommended.

You can view our online booking system by either following the link from our main site www.lacemarkettheatre.co.uk or directly at www.lmtboxoffice.co.uk

From Michael Pearson (Nottingham Arts Theatre)

At the Nottingham Arts Theatre in Nottingham we use an online ticket system called Oscar which has been developed by Nottingham based Savoy Systems (although they are branching out nationally now). We have found this to work brilliantly for what we need.

There are two programs which would be installed on your theatre's computer - Point of Sale for your own Box Office staff to use for telephone and in-person callers, and a Back Office program which sets up all of the shows, ticket prices etc... Once this is all set up then internet sales can begin and the program is designed in such a way that you can have promo codes for discounts, it can be used for members’ databases and membership renewals too, and it allows you to hold your own database of patrons etc... We have found the support from the Savoy Systems team to be great as well. They have different options regarding hosting the system - we have chosen to go with them hosting for us rather than us hosting ourselves for the moment. There are also costs regarding credit card transactions but we cover that with a booking fee (which you can set) on the internet sales and a nominal credit card fee on the by phone/in-person sales.

We also have the main auditorium which we sell as allocated seating and a studio theatre which is unallocated. The system allows us to do this.