Assigned Seating & Interactive Charts

When you're planning a retreat with assigned cushions, a kirtan concert with reserved rows, or a workshop with classroom-style seating, the seating chart is the backbone of your event page. BrightStar's assigned seating system runs on Seats.io, the interactive seating chart engine used by major ticketing platforms worldwide, handling more than seven million bookings a month with 99.99% uptime — reliability that matters most in the exact moment you'd notice its absence, right as doors open and everyone checks their seat at once. Seats.io supports curved theater rows, straight classroom rows, cabaret-style round tables, and mixed configurations that combine all three on one chart, so a single event page can hold a floor of round tables and a raised section of theater rows without treating them as separate systems.

BrightStar gives you three ways to get a chart onto your event page. The AI Chart Builder is fastest: upload a floor plan as a PDF, PNG, JPG, or a photo from your phone, and the AI detects rows, sections, and seat numbers on its own, leaving you to fine-tune with the drag-and-drop editor. The manual editor is there for when no floor plan exists yet, letting you add rows, sections, tables, and individual seats one at a time. Once a chart exists, save it as a venue-specific template and apply it to a future event in one click — keep a Concert Layout and a Workshop Layout for the same room and pick the right one per event. Templates can also start from presets like theatre, arena, classroom, or banquet, each with its own default section, row, and seat counts, so you're editing rather than starting from a blank grid.

Pricing in BrightStar's seating charts is set at the section level. You group rows into named sections — VIP, Orchestra, Balcony, or whatever fits your event — and set a color, price, and capacity for each, then assign the rows that belong to it. A VIP section might cover the first two rows at a smaller capacity and a higher price, while a Balcony section further back covers more seats at a lower one. Every seat inherits its price from its section rather than carrying its own price tag, so moving a row between sections changes what every seat in it costs without editing seats one by one. Underneath, each seat is also scored for desirability — weighing closeness to the center line and distance from the stage, with rows three through five treated as the sweet spot and the front row given a small penalty — and that score is what price tiers get built against.

The risk BrightStar's real-time reservation system is built to prevent is the one every box office has faced: two people click the same seat during a rush and both believe they've bought it. When an attendee selects a seat, it locks instantly over WebSocket across every connected browser and phone, disappearing from availability for everyone else in the same moment. A hold timer then keeps that lock in place — ten minutes by default, adjustable per event between five and fifteen — long enough to finish checkout but short enough that an abandoned cart doesn't quietly hold a seat all night. That lock is a hold token: checkout requests one, every seat you pick is held against it, and if payment succeeds the same token converts those held seats to sold in a single step, so there's no window where a paid seat still reads as free. If the session is abandoned instead, the seats return to available once the token lapses. Each seat moves through the same states — available, held, sold, blocked, or accessible — at every point in that process.

BrightStar's accessibility settings are ADA-compliant seating management built into the same chart, not a separate system: wheelchair-accessible seats with companion seat pairing, hearing loop zone designations, limited mobility aisle seating, and elder or family priority seating. Each accessible seat can be set to one of three visibility modes — visible to all, filter-only, or organizer-assigned — depending on whether you want attendees browsing freely, filtering specifically for accessible seating, or having you place them yourself, which matters at a retreat check-in where you may want someone seated near an exit without listing that seat publicly. Accessibility is a property of the seat rather than a separate block, so an accessible seat stays inside its normal section and price. It's treated differently from an obstructed-view seat in pricing, too: obstructed seats take a downward adjustment in the desirability score and land in a cheaper tier, while accessible seats get no such adjustment, keeping them priced at whatever their position already earns.

Social Seating is described as the world's first social layer for reserved seating, sitting on top of the chart rather than replacing anything in it. When an organizer turns it on and an attendee opts in, that attendee can see where friends are sitting on the interactive map, send a 'Come sit with me' invitation link, and select adjacent seats in one click — useful for a group arriving at a festival gate separately who want the same row without texting seat numbers back and forth. Both sides of the opt-in, organizer and attendee, are optional, so a seat map is never surfaced to someone who hasn't agreed to share where they're sitting. Events using it see 15–25% higher group purchase rates and increased average order values. Assigned seating itself, along with the AI Chart Builder, Social Seating, and reusable templates, is available on BrightStar's Elevate plan and carried forward on Amplify, which adds AI marketing, a larger buyer network, and priority support.