CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

We have a client looking to have an upcoming event where a member can reserve a series of tables and the number of seats at each table; the table host can also pay for any number of the reserved seats and identify who will be sitting at the table. Additional event participants can the purchase their own tickets. We were wondering if anyone has had to solve a similar problem and if so how they addressed it. Some of our ideas are outlined below.

Client site is D7 and on CiviCRM 4.3.1.

Ex. Adam Smith reserves 1 12-person table under his company's name, Adam Smith Inc, and purchases a ticket for himself and his wife. Smith also gives the names of 4 of the remaining people for his table, including Sharon Crowe, and the rest are left unidentified. After reserving the table Sharon Crowe logs in, purchases a ticket, and identifies herself as belonging to Smith's table.

The client's staff can now log in and see that out of Smith's 12 person table, 3 seats have been paid for, and there are still 9 open seats remaining.

One Possible Solution:

Table Reservations are Manual and entered using CDFs

• Create custom field: Table Selection as a multivalue alphanumeric field.
• Table hosts have to call the staff office who would add their table name as an option to the Table Selection field
• Staff could then complete the Table host's ticket purchases or the Table host could go through the Self-Service.
• Staff could take the names of other table participants and register them as pending users on the back end.
• All other table participants could also go through Self-Service and identify the table while purchasing tickets.
• Would use Views displaying Event participants and grouped by table and display registration status. If possible use aggregate options to get total number of Registered participants at each table.
• Pros: Least amount of configuration, requires no custom coding.
• Cons: Not self-service, issue of tracking number of seat reservations is not yet resolved.

We're considering looking into a few other options, but we know less about them.

Using Reservation Drupal Module with CiviEvent
The problem with this one is that the Reservation Module makes it easy for the Table Host to identify and reserve a table, but it doesn't address how the guests of the table host associate themselves at that table.

Tables as Organic Groups
Table host creates an organic group and guests add themselves to the group.

Are there other suggestions?