Create interactive seating charts for online ticket sales

An interactive seating chart turns seat selection into a clear buying experience. Visitors can see available seats, price zones, tables, standing areas and the stage before they book, while your team manages everything inside one ticketing system. TicketTool connects seating charts directly to your online ticket shop, so you can sell numbered seats and mixed admission formats without manual reservations.

For venues and event organizers, this means fewer support questions, fewer seat-allocation mistakes and a more professional checkout flow. If you already have a venue plan, we can help turn it into an interactive seating chart. If you prefer to build it yourself, this guide walks you through the TicketTool seating chart editor step by step.

What types of events should use interactive seating charts?

An interactive seating chart is useful whenever guests need to choose a specific seat, table, area or price zone. It works well for concert halls, theatres, clubs, restaurants, dinner shows, sports arenas and many other event formats. Only pure general-admission events without defined areas usually do not need a seating chart.

A seating chart helps buyers understand the venue immediately. They can compare available seats, choose the right price zone and complete the purchase with confidence. For the organizer, the benefit is just as important: fewer manual explanations, fewer calls about seat location and fewer back-and-forth messages about alternative places.

Even when all tickets are sold at the same price, a seating chart can still improve operations. Guests know where to go before they arrive, entrance staff spend less time answering questions, and the event can start more smoothly because the audience is not searching for seats at the last moment.

How to order a seating chart

If you use TicketTool for online ticket sales, we can help prepare the seating chart for your venue. Send us an up-to-date venue plan, ideally an official PDF, image or link from the venue. Please make sure the plan matches the correct hall and current seating configuration. Many venues have several halls or change their layout depending on the event. The more accurate the source material is, the faster we can create the interactive seating chart and make it ready for ticket sales.

How long does it take to create a seating chart?

A typical seating chart with 500 to 600 seats and a standard row layout can usually be prepared within one or two business days. Large venues, stadiums and complex round layouts such as circuses or amphitheatres can take longer. The timeline depends mainly on the quality of the source plan and the complexity of the seating logic.

How to create a seating chart yourself

You can also create the seating chart yourself in the TicketTool editor. The editor is designed for organizers who want to add seats, rows, tables, price zones, text labels, icons and the stage without using external design software. Simple layouts can be prepared quickly, while more complex venues can be built step by step and adjusted later.

What to prepare before creating a seating chart

Start with a current and reliable venue plan. Not every layout found online reflects the real seating configuration. If rows, tables or blocked areas are copied incorrectly, the seating chart will need extra corrections later.

Once the plan is ready, register in TicketTool and open the “Halls” section. There you can see venues you have already used or add a new one by clicking “Add hall”. After the venue is created, you can open the editor and start building the seating chart.

The venue coordinates are used to show the exact location on the event page. This helps ticket buyers find the venue and use navigation apps without searching manually. You can get latitude and longitude from services such as latlong.net by entering the venue address.

After saving the venue, open the seating chart editor by clicking the button with horizontal lines. The next screenshot highlights this button.

After this, the hall layout editor is opened and the very interesting will start, namely, the development of a new concert hall layout. 

We will tell you about the process of hall layout development on the real example. It will be the “Robert Krieps Hall” located at the address 28, rue Münster L-2160 Luxembourg. The query for developing this hall layout was received from the client on the day of writing this article. The client provided the draft of the hall shown below.

The hall is not very large, it contains only 20 rows and their horizontal placement. From the development point of view, it is very simple; we even have to make the task harder in order to discover all the possibilities of our concert hall editor.

Getting started with the seating charts editor

Hall Editor Window looks as it is shown in the screenshot below:

As you can see, there is a workplace on the left, and on the right, there is a tabbed area for process control. We will study each of the tabs as they are used in the developing process of the hall. Let's start with the settings tab for the size of the layout, this tab is shown in the screenshot above. As you can see, the size of the layout was set to 780 pixels in width and 880 in height. This roughly corresponds to the size of the layout draft. Also on this tab, you can set the background color of the workspace, this option is provided in case the icons are to be placed on the workspace of the same color as the background so they merge with it. In this case, you can change the background during development. The last panel on the active control tab allows you to specify the color of the elements placed on the scheme, in particular the icons, as well as the color of the rectangles or circles, which can indicate the stage or tables on the layout when making the restaurant scheme. After setting the size of the layout, we will proceed to the placement of seats.

Placing seats on the seating chart

For placing the seats, you should open the second tab above with the icon as an armchair. There is a control panel of seats placing in the screenshot below. As an example, we added extra seats with four available ways.

First of all, let’s look at the panel. At the very bottom, there is seat size control. By default, the radius of the circle that represents a seat in the concert hall is set to 10 pixels, respectively, the diameter of this seat will be 20 pixels. We strongly recommend not to change this value, as according to our experience this is the ideal seat size which we always use. As it is mentioned above, there are four ways of seat placing, namely:

1. Placing one seat. You should just press the workplace when you are on the tab of adding seats.
2. Placing a round table. Its number of seats can be indicated on the control panel. The circle of a necessary size that is in between the seats will be added automatically.
3. Placing a square table. The number of seats at each side of the table can be indicated using the corresponding panel. The rectangle which is in between the seats will be added automatically.
4. Placing a group of seats. It can be done with the help of the top area on the control panel.

All four ways of adding seats to the layout are shown in the screenshot from the top left to right. Seats or other elements highlighted in red are active and can be moved along the layout with the mouse or keyboard using the arrow keys. When using the keyboard, the shift occurs by one pixel in the right direction, and when holding the Shift key the move happens immediately by 10 pixels.

Highlighting seating chart elements

While activating the very top tab, the hall layout editor comes to the select mode. When this mode is active, you can highlight several elements on the layout using the mouse, move them or remove them at all. As it is shown in the screenshot below, when you click on the working place of the layout and move the cursor, a rectangle next to the mouse appears on the screen, when you release the mouse button, all elements that appear under the rectangle will become active, and the rectangle will disappear. The highlighting tool works just like in any image editor. After activating all the elements under the rectangle, we will remove them.

Removing seats and other elements

To remove elements, you should highlight the first, i.e. to make them in red color. You can do it with the highlighting tool or just press the necessary element. To highlight several elements, you should hold on the key “Shift”. After marking the elements that must be removed, you should click on the button with the icon of the garbage bin; it is located at the bottom of the panel next to the button of the saving hall layout. After confirming the delete operation, all active items will be deleted.

After we have deleted all the seats and tables that we placed for the demonstration, let’s come back to the hall development.

To begin with, we will place on the layout 20 rows of 17 places in each. As can be seen in the layout of our ticket system provided by the client, the number of seats in each row starting from the 9th row will be less than 17, but we will select and delete them later. It’s easier to do in such a way than to place initially the right number of seats in each row. Prepare unnecessary seats for deletion by highlighting them.

After pressing the delete button, red seats will disappear and we will have the necessary number of seats.

Numbering rows and seats

The first step after placing the seats should be numbering the rows. To do this, go to the fifth tab from the top and proceed with numbering the rows. There is one text field on the tab, the value in this field is assigned to the rows when you click on a seat. But this is not the only way of numbering, you can also do this by adjusting the numbering when the coordinates are horizontal or vertical. Roughly speaking, we click on the first seat in the row, and the system assigns a number immediately to the entire row. Thus, the numbering of 20 rows is done in exactly 20 clicks. The value in the field with the row number also does not need to be changed manually, because it is configured to automatically increment the value by one. This means that after clicking on a place from row 1 the value in the field changes to 2 and so on. By the way, the system can work not only with figures but also with letters. If the numbers of the rows went alphabetically starting with the letter A, we would just complete the work in 20 clicks. After numbering all the rows, our scheme looks like shown in the picture below.

Each seat has the row number which it belongs to.

After the numbering is completed, one should proceed to the assignment of numbers to the seats. To do this, go to the sixth tab from the top, the row numbers will no longer be displayed on the layout since the sixth tab displays the number of seats. Fortunately, to indicate the number of places we also do not have to make several hundred clicks, as we have already assigned numbers to the rows we can number the seats automatically in whole rows. Because of this, it is very important to follow this sequence of actions, first number the rows, and then the seats. The numbering of the rows was also completed in 20 clicks since our hall layout editor can automatically arrange seat numbers from left to right, increasing the value in the field by one or choosing the next letter in the alphabet. This is what we get after numbering the seats.

Assigning zones in the seating chart

After the assignment of rows and seats, we can indicate to what zones seats belong to. It should be noted that by zone we understand the seats in the hall, grouped by their location. In small halls, there is usually only “Parterre” and “Balcony”. In large halls, there can be several balconies and a lot of boxes. In the given case there is only one zone and we call it “Parter” and assign all seats to it. To do this, go to the eighth tab from the top, with an icon in the form of a fence. On this tab, it is possible to add zones, while assigning colors to them. Colors are necessary to visually distinguish zones in the layout. After creating the “Parter” zone and assigning it a green color, select the “All” option in the seat assignment control panel, which will assign the zone to all seats at once. From the names of other options, it’s clear that we can assign zones to the entire row or separate seats by clicking. It is possible only in case if they have the same coordinates as the seat we click horizontally or vertically.

Assigning prices to seats

To assign the price, you should go to the tab with a dollar sign. Setting the price is similar to setting zones. We add the name, set the price and color that will correspond to the price category. As an example, we add three price zones and set the prices according to the row.

Adding text to the seating chart

On every scheme you should enumerate the rows in order the ticket buyers can better focus on the layout, and later in the hall itself. Also, it would be better to show the zones in which the seats belong to. For this, our editor has all the necessary tools. The tab for working with texts is the fourth on top and has an icon with the letter “T”. By going to this tab we see that we have the opportunity to choose the size and font of the text. You should only enter the text and click on the only button on the tab so that the text appears on the working panel. For example, we placed the word “Parter” above the first row. After this, we can place the rows numbers on the layout. It is not necessary to add the text and move it manually, everything is much easier. The numbers of rows can be added by clicking on the seat. For example, clicking on the first seat on the left in any row, there will appear the sign with this row number. At the very bottom of the control panel, you can choose the place this text should appear. It can be either on the left, right, bottom or top of the seat we click on. In this case, the numbering of seats in a row takes us 40 clicks (because there are 20 rows in the diagram). The numbering will appear in the first and last seat of each row, on the right or left of these seats. The result of the work on adding texts to the layout of our concert hall is shown below.

Adding the stage to the seating chart

In order to show where the stage is you should go on the seventh tab from the top on which the icon with a square is presented. Here you can give the rectangle dimensions and its coordinates that will be added to the layout. The size of this rectangle can be changed by dragging the lower right corner. To change the coordinates you can either use the keyboard or move the rectangle with the mouse. We place such a rectangle across the width of the entire first row. We will remind you that the color of this rectangle is set on the general settings tab, which was described at the beginning of this article. Also, it should be mentioned that the added rectangle can serve us as a button for choosing seats in a certain price category. For example, to set the price on a dance floor it is necessary to go to the tab, indicate the price category and click on this rectangle to set the price.

Adding icons to the seating chart

The last step in developing the hall layout is adding the icons. To do this, we will go to the third tab at the top and among many useful icons including the icon indicating the exit from the room or the icon showing the WIFI access point, we select the necessary ones. In order to make the layout a little more informative, we will place a microphone icon on the top of the rectangle showing the stage, and also mark the last two seats in the twentieth row as the ones for people in wheelchairs.

Besides, opposite the first and last row, we place the icons indicating the presence of exits. As we indicated above, the color of the icons can be changed. It is also possible to choose one of three icon sizes. In this example the smallest and medium icons are present. We didn’t use the large ones, but they can be useful if you need to show parking spaces or other large elements.

The hall layout that we have developed will look as it is shown in the picture below.

The last thing to do is to reduce the width of the hall, as the original one was a bit large. After that, we can save the layout and proceed to the event creation using the scheme we have just made.

This article appeared to be rather large, but the information presented here is very important. Realizing the importance of this information, we intend to make a video illustrating the process of developing the hall a little bit later.