Among many exciting new developments we showcased at VistaCon this year, one key innovation that saw a great deal of interest and enthusiasm from our clients was how we are reimagining ticketing pricing with pricing rules.

Pricing rules provide a new way to implement price variations and changes across a cinema circuit, through a far simpler and more intuitive combination of base ticket prices, adjustments, and overrides.

A wide range of factors contribute to determining every cinema ticket price; times of day, days of the week, film formats, seating, and cinema-specific variations. The more cinema offerings innovate and expand in complexity, so does the work of managing their full range of ticket prices across their circuit, so we sought to find the solution.

“Why redefine pricing?”

We heard cinemas faced difficulty with the complexity of price changes. In 2024, we began working on a new ticket pricing delivery, with the goal of creating an easier, more intuitive system that would reduce the time and effort required to make pricing changes, reduce data duplication, and remove the complexity of attributing accurate prices to sessions.

By reducing the time, effort, and complexity of pricing, we would free our clients to focus more of their time on pricing strategies, make faster adjustments, and empower stronger revenue outcomes.

The Vista team undertook extensive research to first understand the challenges and difficulties you faced with the traditional pricing system of price cards. Through countless meetings covering dozens of hours of video calls and in-person workshops, working closely with 18 clients, we gathered feedback and began to analyse the difficulties.

From this extensive collaboration, the challenges of price cards boiled down to a simple problem: it takes too long to implement pricing changes.

With the sheer number of price cards cinemas have, we found it could take up to two weeks to implement a pricing change. Ideally, we wanted to create a way that cinema operators could execute this in a single day.

Simplifying the complexity problem

To demonstrate the complexity of price cards, let’s look at a standard ticket pricing breakdown. A standard adult ticket price range might include variations for discounted Tuesdays, a different price on Friday nights and weekends, an increase for 3D screenings, and increases for premium seating. While that’s only four adjustments to a ticket’s base price, cinemas need to create price cards to account for each combination, meaning:

• Standard adult ticket
• Adult weekend ticket
• Adult Tuesday discount ticket
• Adult 3D ticket
• Adult premium seating ticket
• Adult 3D + weekend ticket
• Adult 3D + Tuesday discount ticket
• Adult premium seating + weekend ticket
• Adult premium seating + Tuesday discount ticket
• Adult 3D + premium seating ticket
• Adult 3D + premium seating + weekend ticket
• Adult 3D + premium seating + Tuesday discount ticket

While not all of these combinations require their own unique price card, considering that different cinema sites in a circuit frequently have different price points for their tickets and adjustments (and therefore need to account for the same combinations again for each site or group) it’s easy to see how cinemas can end up with hundreds or even thousands of price cards.

The solution: pricing rules

We knew there had to be a better way of both implementing these changes and simplifying the way cinema operators work with them.

The answer came in the form of pricing rules.

Pricing rules are built on the same fundamental structure for ticket prices: base price + adjustments and overrides.

Cinema operators can set up a rule with the base prices for their ticket types—for example, standard adult, child, and senior tickets—and set adjustments to the price based on the factors that matter to them: time of day, day of the week, film format, seating, etc. Ticket prices are then automatically calculated based on any combination of adjustments that apply.

By setting up the same four adjustments in our price card example above, one pricing rule covers the equivalent of more than 30 price cards per cinema, for an entire circuit.

Individual cinemas in a circuit may have different base prices or adjustments, so cinema overrides allow you to overrule any individual price, adjustment, or base ticket for a cinema or cinema group. To prevent conflicting rules, each ticket type can only belong to one standard rule.

Making effective pricing alterations easy

One of our guiding aspirations in building pricing rules was to save our clients time and effort. From the setup of each rule, to assigning prices to sessions in Showtime Manager, we’ve aimed to simplify and remove pain points from each step of ticket pricing.

Making pricing changes is also easier. Editing a single rule—which applies across all your cinemas—is intuitive, and allows for bulk editing to increase, decrease, or set prices across multiple ticket types or cinemas at once. And to support your ability to make faster pricing changes, we have the architecture to refresh price updates in a matter of hours.

Building pricing to empower your decisions

This reimagining of ticket pricing was built from the ground up by the needs of our clients. Your priorities, pain points, and goals determined how we went about redefining cinema ticket pricing, in order to create the ideal solution.

When we first set out to understand the problem, we saw how time-consuming and difficult it was to implement a pricing change across a cinema circuit, taking as much as two weeks of work to implement. With pricing rules, we hope to have achieved that dream of implementing pricing changes in a single day.

There’s more still to come, with further developments on our roadmap, including special event pricing and further enhancements to enrich rules capabilities.

To learn more about how pricing rules work, visit the Vista Help Centre below.