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Alternative seating plan goes online

Seatbooker today released a new method for selecting seats down to the seat level. The system is enabled for all current and future events to give more users the ability to select their perfect seats.

Seating plan

Seatbooker was the first to introduce seat-level ticket selection to the web, back in 2001, with the activation of Tottenham Hotspur's online ticketing page. At that time, the only feasible method to display an interactive seating plan to the user was by using a Java applet in the user's web browser. This method works extremely well and allows changes in availability to be shown to the user as soon as they happen (a feature of Seatbooker that has still not been achieved on any other system). The only problem with this method is the requirement to have Java installed on the user's computer. In a corporate environment it's not always possible to install Java due to security restrictions, so an alternative needed to be developed to solve this problem.

In the past couple of years it has become possible to run much more complex programs inside the web browser using Javascript and a technique known as AJAX. The alternative seating plan display was developed using this technique and displays the seating layout to the user in exactly the same way as the previous Java version. The plan has been designed to run on as many different web browsers as possible, and has been tested on the following:

  • Internet Explorer 6 / 7
  • Firefox 1.5 / 2
  • Safari 2
  • Opera 9
  • Konquerer 3.5

To select the alternative seating plan, users select a link underneath the plan entitled "Can't see the seating plan?". They are then presented with a window that allows them to choose the plan that works best on their computer. The choice is then saved permanently for that particular computer.

The extra feature of having two different ways of presenting the seating plan to the user makes it very unlikely that the user's computer will be unable to display the plan and allows more people to select exactly where they would like to sit in the stadium.

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