Tale of booking: tickets to Karo Film on Poster’s website, or What is the difference between “booking” and “booking”

Recent days in the blog "Posters" with might and main announced a new opportunity - booking tickets in cinemas network "Karo Film" directly from the site.

It would seem that the "buy a ticket" and "book" buttons have long become familiar throughout the internet, at least for concerts, at least for a train or a plane. Is it worth it to raise so much noise due to the fact that now it can be done with cinemas, and only in one network? Let's see what is really behind this news.
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Import schedules? Accordion!

It is worth starting a story with news that was barely noticed a month ago - on the Billboard there was an import of schedules all from the same Karo. According to the developers, the import does not just promise to release enslaved women , but also guarantees the accuracy of the schedule to the last digit for the given second.

In the comments and in blogs, loud laughter immediately began - how, how, Karo publishes his schedules as XML files from 1913, the link to them stands from the home page of the site, and “Posters” have hands, they say, before importing have reached just now. LOL, fuckers!

Fortunately, instead of responding to each and every one, the valiant development team continued what the import of timetables was part of, namely, integration with the internal booking system of the entire Karo Film network, which is scattered in different cities. That is, not with what is displayed in XML, but with what real tickets are being sold for. And here we turn to the difference between online booking and the usual link “buy a ticket” (which, if we recall, on the same “Poster”, you could see before our era).

"Take the usual powder," or "why ordering tickets is not perfect"

As a rule, on most sites with schedules and catalogs, the link to purchase does not give anything - this is the gateway to the partner’s site. You click on the link, and you catapult right into the hands of the ticket office. If you leave with or without a ticket, it depends on the responsibility of the website developers and company employees.



Not often, but there are cases when the tickets run out, they will forget to call you back, the site will break and you will be told in the face “500 Internal Server Error, call the ambulance and the police, please”. In general, all the charms of e-business in local latitudes. No guarantee, no confidence.

However, in the absence of other options, and this suit. And if girls with pleasant voices call back, and then sweet grandmother couriers bring a ticket, and then they let you take it to the concert - in general, the beauty and the triumph of civilization. True, I want stability.

How does the movie network

Each film network is a factory for the production and sale of entertainment to visitors. Its goal is maximum profit and optimization of production. Therefore, film chains, robots, and accounting supercomputers, which take into account how many tickets, for what, and when they are sold, stand inside the cinema chains for a long time. In particularly sophisticated cases, artificial intelligence also shuffles sessions in the halls of multiplexes, adjusting the schedule for the popularity and relevance of a movie.

Most of all, this is similar to the way display works in stores, or contextual advertising and recommendation services on the Internet. Only instead of ratings and clicks - sold tickets, the number of which affects the "ranking" in each individual cinema. And if in the last two or three years you have been in multiplex cinemas and paid attention to the scoreboard, you probably saw that there is also its analogue of the tag cloud - popular movies, halls and sessions (and those that occur earlier) are written larger .

So, we keep in mind this story, and return to the booking. What is needed from him? In general, a little. If I clicked the button “I want this film” and then clarified that I want to go then and there, and sit down in the middle of the trump row itself - then I need only two things:

1. Not forget.
2. Come and sit down. Without any questions.

About "not to forget" I can take care of myself. But about “come and sit down” ... This is where our long prehistory ends, and the work of the “Poster” begins.

True Booking

So, first choose what to go. With this, Poster has no problems - the schedule is, chose, and forward. As it is written in the Poster blog, the booking system is directly connected to Karo Film, so we see in the schedule what cashiers see in theaters in front of them. The next step is to order a place for yourself and your friends.

Here before there was always complexity - the only decent service, of all known to me, was the Formula Cinema mobile application, which allowed you to immediately choose a movie, a session, a hall, a number and place right on the phone. For this (via SMS) was taken about 50 rubles, and then it became, it seems, free of charge (but not so convenient).

Booking through the Formula Movie website is very strange. And the site Karo Film does not work well in my Firefox.

The poster is more convenient than a phone - there is more space on the screen, so choosing a movie or a cinema, you can see all the available sessions, all you have to do is click on the right time and see what happens.



And this is rarely anyone from online agents can boast - due to the direct inclusion, “Afisha” tells me which places are free, and where else you can land in time.

A map of the hall with empty seats (or several halls, if at the same time the film is launched on several screens) makes it clear where the 18th place is on the 10th row - completely from the edge in the tiny hall, or exactly in the middle before the large screen. In multiplexes with different rooms, where remembering the location and size of each is not easy, it saves a lot.

The multi-colored legend helps to deal with prices, and the bottom is summarized. Finally, after fighting with the captcha, booking is made. Hooray. Issued a reservation number, with which I will go to the cinema to get my tickets. To buy tickets, we need only these numbers.

After the release, it turns out that wherever I now go around the Poster site, the link “Book” settled in my right corner. She leads to the list of booked tickets, which is more like a basket in the online store.

It's great, because I regularly forget about the films I was going to go to and book everything at once, and then just come and buy it out - much more convenient. It would remind me about the sessions by mail ...



On the list page, you can cancel the reservation, or you can print out the coupon with which to come to the cinema (instead of remembering the number). Just in case, the map will be printed here (hello, Google Maps!), So getting lost will not be so easy. It is not necessary to print a coupon, but it's more pleasant with it.

Than it is fraught

It seems that the world of universal integration will be hellishly convenient - at least you can no longer think about how not to come to a session at empty cash registers (which happened four times with me over the past year), and then everything comes down only to to be in time for armor redemption time (and hope that nothing inside the supercomputers is confused).

Among the inconveniences, there is a restriction on 5 tickets (which can be bypassed if one of the friends helps and takes a few more tickets on himself), and the captcha, which, they say, was very much asked by the guys from Karo. I also wonder what happens if the session for which I booked a ticket suddenly moves somewhere. The rest ... Well, the movie is happiness, it seems. Go, go to the Kung Fu Pandu.

About the author: I work in the Poster, but do not belong to the team that worked on the reservation. Therefore, on the one hand, I am a representative of the company, and on the other - the complete user who loves convenient services, and scolds uncomfortable.