Platform Helps Special Event Organizers to Meet COVID-19 Visitation Guidelines That Challenge Today’s Large- scale Events
San Francisco, CA
CellarPass, the leading wine industry booking and guest management platform, has announced the latest generation of their passport management features have been officially released. The upgraded tools were designed with the assistance of four major California destination marketing organizations to specifically to allow them host large-scale events while meeting California’s strict visitation guidelines set in place due to COVID-19.
“CellarPass is the only passport platform that addresses the complicated California visitation requirements with an innovative combination of our ticketing and reservations features,” stated CellarPass co-founder Jonathan Elliman. “With one transaction, an attendee can select their participation level and book their entire passport weekend and be done”, continues Jonathan. “What’s also absolutely unique is an attendee can view each of the participating properties and their availability, day-by-day, before they purchase their passport, avoiding the pitfalls of guests not getting their preferred itineraries only realizing after purchasing their passport.”
With wineries, tasting rooms and event organizers continue to be impacted well through 2021, CellarPass made the conscious decision to develop a solution that would help keep doors open, save jobs and provide the revenue destination organizations need to stay afloat. With so many signature wine tasting events at risk, the team at CellarPass spent six months developing a solution that would address the visitation requirements, but also future proof the design to build more capability as requirements change.
“We are excited to utilize the new Cellar Pass Passport Platform for our events in 2021!”, says Jack Gorman, Executive Director of Amador Vintners Association. “As with almost all other wine regions, COVID has had a tremendous impact on our revenues since we have not been able to hold our annual events” continues Gorman. “The CellarPass platform will allow us to hold our annual passport events in a COVID safe environment, complying with all state and local safety guidelines. The CellarPass team has been tremendous to work with, incorporating functionality to meet very specific, but necessary, requests. The CellarPass Passport Platform is a game changer for us.”
The passport platform has a wide-variety of first-to-market and first-to-industry features to be proud of. One of the common issues with passport events is keeping guests on time, or guests overcommitting themselves. To help solve this paradigm, the CellarPass engineers provide average travel time between destinations, blocking guests from adding a destination to their itinerary if the allocated time between appointments requires more travel time than they have available between appointments.
Once an attendee has selected all their preferred destinations and appointment times, the entire transaction is completed with a single charge to their credit card. An instant confirmation of their itinerary is provided while also a detailed calendar view is provided that includes the destinations they have chosen, their appointment times, estimated travel times, destination street address, phone number and much more. The itinerary system even encourages attendees to add their hotel reservations, restaurant reservations and anything they would like to have on their itinerary.
“I believe this new platform will allow us to deliver an elevated experience for our guests, provide better tools for our wineries to use in welcoming our attendees and gives our organization complete control over the entire event, from individual table management to turn times”, says Gorman.
Though CellarPass has invested thousands of hours of development and design invested in the platform, CellarPass wanted to make sure it was available and affordable to all event organizers across the United States. By introducing a new ticketing fee structure, event organizers have the option to pass the CellarPass service fees and the credit card processing fees onto the ticketholder, essentially making the platform entire free to the event organizer.
With many signature events finding the need to re-invent themselves in 2021, the CellarPass team wanted to develop a way to future-proof the platform by introducing a way to allow event organizers to offer VIP-level access to events which then provide exclusive access to attendees who purchase the VIP-level tickets. This ticket level could also trigger exclusive times, group sizes and other custom visitation requirements that could be configured to welcome guests onto each property.
“It is due to innovative wine industry technology partners such as CellarPass that El Dorado Winery Association is able to deliver a fantastic and well-planned passport-style event in 2021 despite the visitation restrictions that are in place due to COVID-19” says Kara Sather, Executive Director of El Dorado Winery Association. “In just a few months, the CellarPass team took the almost insurmountable challenges we were facing to hold an event in 2021 and worked diligently to find a solution and we are now able to host our annual event, which is coincidentally celebrating the event’s 30th anniversary this year” continues Sather. “By providing a simple online form that allows our attendees to buy their tickets while booking their reservations, CellarPass was able to solve all the obstacles we were facing – a task that many other platforms were not willing to even consider discussing with us”, continues Sather. “CellarPass took on the challenge and overdelivered with even more capability than we had hoped for.”
For more information on the CellarPass platform, visit CellarPass.com.
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About CellarPass
Celebrating 11 years, CellarPass is the leading real-time guest management platform designed for the wine industry that offers visitors an easy way to buy tickets and book reservations, online or through a mobile-friendly website. Headquartered in San Francisco, with local offices in Paso Robles, Seattle and Napa Valley, CellarPass offers enterprise-level guest management platform for the alcohol industry that allows the leading wineries, breweries and distilleries a tool that enhances the visitor experience while building long-lasting relationships. For more information about CellarPass, visit www.cellarpass.com. Follow CellarPass on Facebook at facebook.com/cellarpass, on Twitter at twitter.com/cellarpass and on Instagram at instagram.com/cellarpass to get fresh updates.
Media Contacts:
Sarah Elliman, CEO, co-founder
(855) 423-4448
media@cellarpass.com