“Admission plus the planetarium show for one price.” “All four Saturday workshops for $120.” “Behind-the-scenes tour, lunch, and a train ride for the school group.” Each of these is a ticket bundle, and each one runs into the same question in Altru: how do you sell several scheduled things together, at one price, without losing track of capacity or revenue?
Altru has no single “bundle” button that covers all of these cases. Which approach works depends on what you’re bundling and who is buying it. This guide walks through the options an Altru admin actually has, what each one gives up, and how to test before anything goes on sale.
First, decide what kind of bundle you mean
Bundles fall into roughly three types, and they behave very differently in Altru:
- Same-day combos. General admission plus a timed program on one visit, like a show, a tour, or a feeding. The guest picks one date and one time slot.
- Series passes. One purchase covers several scheduled events on different dates, like a lecture series, a camp week, or a class that meets four times.
- Group packages. A booked visit for a school, tour operator, or private party that combines several programs, sometimes with food or other add-ons.
Write down which one you’re building before you open program setup. Most bundle trouble comes from forcing a series pass into a tool built for same-day combos, or the other way around.
Option 1: Altru’s combination setup, if it’s available to you
Depending on your Altru configuration, program management may include a way to define a combination of programs sold together at a combined price, so a cashier rings up one item and Altru issues tickets for each component. If you have it, this is usually the cleanest choice for same-day combos, because each component still draws down its own event capacity and still produces its own ticket for scanning.
Things to confirm in a sandbox or with Blackbaud support before you rely on it:
- Whether the combination is available in daily sales only, or also on your web forms and in advance sales.
- How the combined price is split across the component programs for revenue and GL reporting.
- What happens when one component is sold out. Does the whole combo become unavailable, or can a cashier override it?
- How a partial refund works if a guest skips the show but used their admission.
If you can’t find a combination option or it doesn’t behave the way you expect, use one of the approaches below rather than guessing.
Option 2: A separate “package” program
The simplest workaround is to create a program that represents the bundle itself, like “Spring Lecture Series Pass” or “Camp Week: June 9 to 13,” with its own price and its own capacity.
This is quick to set up and easy for staff to sell. The catch is that the package program doesn’t automatically reserve seats in the underlying events. If the lecture hall holds 120 and you sell 40 series passes, you have to cut the single-event capacity to 80 by hand. You’ll also need to decide how pass holders get in on each date: a printed pass that staff check against a list, or a separate zero-dollar ticket per session issued after purchase.
Use this for series passes with modest volume, where a person can reconcile capacity once a week.
Option 3: Individual tickets plus a discount
Another route is to sell each component as a normal ticket and apply a discount that brings the total down to the bundle price. Capacity stays accurate because every seat is a real ticket on a real event, and scanning works the same as always.
The tradeoffs:
- Staff have to add every component and apply the right discount, which invites mistakes at the register.
- Whether a discount can apply automatically when a specific set of programs is in the cart is something to test in your own setup. Don’t assume it.
- Online, guests have to find and add each piece themselves, which many won’t do.
This works best when the bundle is mostly sold by trained staff and capacity accuracy matters more than speed.
Option 4: Group sales for packaged visits
For school and tour groups, Altru’s group sales area is built for this. A reservation can hold several programs on an itinerary with times, counts, and pricing. It’s the natural home for “tour plus lunch plus train” packages. Just keep group bundles out of daily sales so the two don’t compete for the same capacity without anyone noticing.
Problems to plan for on any approach
Revenue allocation
Your finance team will want to know how a $45 bundle is split between admission and the show. Settle the split, write it down, and check that a test transaction posts the way you expect in revenue and batch reports.
Capacity on the scarce piece
The limiting item is almost always the timed program, not admission. Build the bundle around that event’s availability, and check how many bundles can sell before it fills.
Refunds and exchanges
Decide ahead of time whether a bundle can be partly refunded or only refunded in full, and whether one component can move to another date. Then tell staff.
Reporting
Build a query or report that shows bundle sales separately from single-ticket sales. Otherwise you won’t know next year whether the bundle was worth repeating.
A short test before launch
- In a sandbox or on a test date, sell one bundle at the desk and one online, if you’re offering it online.
- Check that capacity dropped on every component event.
- Scan or redeem every ticket the bundle produced.
- Refund one and confirm capacity and revenue reverse correctly.
- Run your revenue and batch reports and confirm the split matches what finance expects.
If all five behave, you’re ready to sell. If any of them surprise you, that’s the piece to raise with Blackbaud support or rethink before customers see it.
Quick answers
Can a series pass reserve a seat in each session automatically?
Not with a standalone package program. You either adjust single-event capacity by hand or issue a ticket for each session. If your setup has a combination option, test whether it handles multi-date components before you count on it.
Should members get a bundle discount on top of member pricing?
That’s a policy call. Whatever you choose, test it, because stacking discounts and member price types can produce totals nobody intended.
