Do you sell out EVERY seat in the house? If no, what is a percentage that you do not sell for people who sneak in and to make up for those seats where people refuse to sit?

For a 300-400 seat house my personal rule was always 50 seats. For something smaller like 150-200 I would always leave 25 seats. Doing this saved a LOT of unhappy customers, saved a LOT of wasted time trying to force every person into a specific seat (because let's face it, if you sell EVERY seat there will be a lot of people unhappy with their chair's location) and I think it just helps out overall with customer satisfaction. I wonder how many people are mandated by their corporate pencil pushers to sell every seat so they can make those extra few bucks.

As I said before, it's a no win situation. I'm simply in search of that 'happy medium'.

We are working on the "Best Available Seat" option.
i.e. the first seats sold are 2/3 back etc.

However I am still reluctant to sell that last 5%, due to the people who arrive 5 minutes before showtime & demand to be seated.

In this situation we go by the addage of "the customer is always a right bastard" and seat them in the front row next to the wall.

Sometime in the mid eighties, I realized that booking terms didn't reward theatres for selling every last seat, and the late starts, customer complaints, and added staffing costs seemed to make it more sensible to do an auditorium check at fifty seats and leave between one and two dozen seats open. I still think that is a good guideline for a 250 - 500 seat house.

I would never leave fifty seats empty unless the auditorium had an unusually high number of "booker" seats that were so neck straining they came with chiropractor business cards.

As a "man behind a desk" I would be more concerned about low fill levels as an indicator of loss of control in people swapping auditoriums or a ticket seller/taker skimming than I would be about any minimal loss of revenue during the high percentage weeks.

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Regarding saving seats: Aren't patrons encouraged to always keep their ticket stub with them for re-entry? Then how could you expect the person in the auditorium to produce the tickets stup for someone who has stepped out?

Regarding the "saving seats" question, you'll note that I included a restroom check (with the unsaid purpose of counting heads (nice unintentional pun ) prior to demanding a customer give up a "saved" seat. In the extremely unlikely event that the person actually did show up, I would move the latecomer. I never had that be the case though. Some customers lie through their teeth, and others get "stood up" on dates.

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If we still have a queue of people coming in at the published start time, we delay the film until everyone has taken their seat (with the house lights on).