Accessible Booking Improves Audience Experiences at Opera Holland Park
Accessibility became a shared priority
Opera Holland Park decided to step up accessibility in spring 2019 when team members attended a public workshop led by Spektrix. That session became the starting point for a more focused approach, followed by a deeper conversation with Ruth from the Spektrix team about access measures and ambitions specific to Opera Holland Park.
What began with the marketing and ticketing and sales teams quickly expanded to include representatives from development, production, press, and operations. To their surprise and delight, everyone attended – and each person brought ideas about how their team could support improvements. That conversation became a regular monthly meeting, and one of the first genuinely cross-organisational collaborations the team had had in some time.
It seems like a daunting task if you look at it in its entirety. What really helped is the support from Spektrix to bring it into focus – it’s not something you have to do all at once, you can implement smaller portions and not take on a huge risk.Doug Mackie
Ticketing and Box Office Manager
Chloe, Doug, and Philippa were already personally committed to making the audience experience more accessible, and seeing so many colleagues get involved gave the work real momentum. Through conversations with the Spektrix team at the 2019 conference and in one-to-one consultancy, the work moved beyond immediate practicalities into wider thinking about disability, access, and best practice across the sector.
We talked through what we’re doing and what we could do better, and ran into things we didn’t even know we weren’t doing that we could improve on. The resources and examples given were a springboard to improve our access services.Philippa Peall
Marketing Officer
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20%
of seats step-free after the redesign
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Automatic access
to half-price tickets and detailed seat information
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Priority booking
Proved intuitive, accessible, and informative when trialled
Making booking more accessible
By early 2020, the team felt ready to turn that planning into changes audience members would notice. The venue itself posed the biggest challenge. Set in the middle of a park, it came with inherent restrictions, from the lack of disabled parking to flights of 26 steps leading to many seats.
Audience members with access requirements were offered half-price tickets, but they had to call the box office to buy them. For Opera Holland Park, that added friction to the booking experience and limited access for some audience members.
In 2020, three changes combined to create a more accessible, flexible booking experience and strengthen accessible booking for the organisation’s audience:
- Audience members could identify their own access needs in Spektrix. This automatically generated an access tag on their account and triggered a welcome email from dotdigital with Opera Holland Park’s access policy and online booking information.
- Audience members could then book online, receive automatic access to half-price tickets, and choose seats from a detailed seating plan that included information such as the number of steps to each seat.
- Improved website accessibility meant more detailed access information, including what was and was not possible. That clarity helped people make informed decisions about their visit and choose the option that worked best for them.
During a test phase, a small group of loyal bookers – including people who regularly called on the first day of onsale to reserve accessible tickets – were invited into a priority booking period so they could try the process and share feedback. Many were able to book successfully even before their instructions arrived, showing the team they had created a process that was intuitive, accessible, and informative.
Access was core to our values, so we’d have got all this set up in the end. But with Spektrix as a sounding board, it was much quicker and easier to get going and do it as well as possible.Chloe Bridgen
Head of Marketing
Building on progress
After Covid-19 forced the cancellation of Opera Holland Park’s 2020 season, the organisation reopened in 2021 with a newly designed auditorium intended to feel even more connected to the outdoors. Performance designer takis created a space that made the audience part of the creative experience, gathering chairs from old productions by Opera Holland Park, Welsh National Opera, and others, and reducing capacity to 400 seats to help keep performers and audiences secure.
That enforced change also created new opportunities for the team’s accessibility work. With 20% of seats now step-free, the team restructured pricing so the full range of price bands was available with level access. With the team working from home, staffing box office phones became more difficult than ever, so the ease of online access bookings proved valuable for the team as well as for audience members.
“One visitor had been coming to our events for years, but had an adult autistic son who she didn’t think would ever be able to join her. She brought him to a Discovery Matinee and he had a great time. They stood at the edge of the space so he could dance and sing along, and enjoy an experience together that they hadn’t thought could be possible.”
Opera Holland Park also launched Discovery Matinees – relaxed, audio-described performances with lower ticket prices that made it easier for whole families to attend together at an accessible time of day.
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400
seats in the redesigned auditorium that reopened in 2021
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Half-price tickets
for audience members with access requirements
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Discovery Matinees
introduced relaxed, audio-described performances at lower ticket prices
Discovery Matinees went on sale on a slightly different schedule from the rest of the season, which gave the team space to build more specific messaging at the point of sale and in pre-event communications. That content focused on plain English and anticipated key questions about the experience – setting out the sights and sounds audiences could expect, creating visual stories, and introducing characters.
Those efforts also helped the marketing team see that content created to support access could strengthen wider audience communications too, with visual material that also worked well in broader social media campaigns.
Better audience experience, clearer access communication
Cross-organisational commitment helped Opera Holland Park improve both the audience experience and the clarity of its communications around access. The result was not just more accessible booking, but a stronger foundation for building audience relationships over time through connected data, clearer communication, and a more confident approach to accessibility.
