Theatre seating charts, numbered the classic way

What makes a theatre seating plan easy to sell

A theatre seating chart has two audiences: the person choosing a seat online and the usher showing them to it. Both need the same three things from the plan: where the stage is, which part of the house a seat is in, and how to find the row.

Name sections the way your house talks about them. Stalls, dress circle, balcony, boxes: if the box office says "balcony", the plan should not say "level 2". Give each section its own colour and, where prices differ, a category such as Stalls, Balcony or Box that your ticketing can price.

Draw the curve. Rows in most traditional houses bend around the stage, and a chart with straight rows makes side seats look better or worse than they are. In seatorio you can bend whole sections into arcs that follow the stage.

Be honest about the view. Mark restricted-view seats, wheelchair places and seats behind a pillar so buyers see them before they pay, and so the box office stops answering the same question. The theatre seating chart template has curved stalls in fourteen roman-numbered rows, a balcony and six boxes to start from.

Seat numbering in stalls, balcony and boxes

Theatres number seats in more ways than any other venue, and the chart has to match the tickets already printed for years. seatorio lets you set the scheme per section, so stalls, balcony and boxes can each follow their own rules.

Rows can be roman numerals (I, II, III), letters (A, B, C) or numbers, and you choose where they start and whether the first row is at the front or the back. Seats can run left to right, right to left, or from both ends towards the centre. Any single row can have a custom label, for example a front row your house has always called "AA".

Many halls continue the seat numbers across an aisle, so the right-hand block of row VII starts at 15. Select the seats of that row and number them from a chosen start; the rest of the section keeps its scheme. Boxes work the same way: each box is a small section with its own rows and seats.

Our theatre seat numbering guide walks through the common schemes and when to use each. Settle the numbering before you go on sale: the seat id your ticketing system stores is built from the section name, row and number.

What the export gives your ticketing system

seatorio does not sell tickets. It produces the seating chart your ticketing system or website shows to buyers. In the SVG export every seat is a clickable element with data attributes: a stable id, a uuid, its section and a status. Section outlines carry their name and category, and the JSON export gives every seat its row, number and label.

A developer attaches one click listener to the image, reads the seat's attributes and adds it to the basket. Sold or reserved seats are shown by changing the status attribute; the exported file already includes a small stylesheet that greys them out. Seats you mark as not for sale are greyed with a cross on the plan, and the JSON flags them so the ticketing system can skip them.

The JSON export holds the whole plan: sections, categories, floors, rows, seats with their numbers and accessibility flags, plus a uid for every seat. It can be imported back into seatorio for the next season. See how a seat map connects to online booking for the integration steps.

Who uses it

Theatres and opera houses replacing an old PDF chart with one their website can use. Concert halls and cultural centres with several halls and a mix of seated and unseated events. Ticketing companies that onboard new venues and need each one drawn and numbered consistently. Touring producers who need the chart of every house on the route. Schools, universities and community halls that put on a few shows a year and want reserved seating for the end-of-year show. Once the chart is right, it serves every production in the house: the drawing stays, and only the status of each seat changes from show to show.

If your hall exists only as a CAD drawing or a scanned PDF, our done-for-you service draws it for you and returns a numbered chart that matches your tickets. For cinemas and smaller screening rooms, see the cinema seat maps; for balls and galas held in a theatre or ballroom, see gala seating plans. Large houses can check seat limits on the pricing page.

Guides for theatres

• Theatre seat numbering: rows, aisles and sectionsA ticket says "Stalls, row F, seat 12". Behind that line are a few conventions that make a house easy to sell and easy to find your way in.
• What a seat map needs for online bookingA picture of your venue is not yet a seat map. To sell from it, every seat on the picture has to be a record your booking system can find.
• How to plan wheelchair spaces and accessible seatingAccessible places only work if guests can find them, book them and reach them. The seating plan is where all three start.
• How to plan a concert seating chartA concert can fill the same room as a seated symphony one night and a standing crowd the next. The seating chart has to handle both, and make each ticket easy to understand.
• How to convert a floor plan into a digital seating chartMost venues already have a plan: a PDF from the architect, a CAD file, a printed chart at the box office or a photo of the wall map. Turning it into a seat map you can sell from is mostly careful redrawing.