How to Sell Timed-Entry Tickets for a Pumpkin Patch or Corn Maze
Platform options, capacity math, pricing that smooths out your Saturday crowd, and a weather and refund policy that doesn't cost you a weekend.
Timed-entry tickets solve one problem: too many people between 1pm and 3pm on a sunny October Saturday, and nobody on a cloudy Friday. Selling tickets online by time slot spreads the crowd, puts money in the bank before the weather turns, and ends the line at the gate. This guide walks through the platforms, the capacity math, the pricing, and the weather policy.
Do you need timed entry at all?
Not every farm does. Timed entry makes sense when at least two of these are true:
- Your parking lot fills on peak weekends and cars back up onto the county road.
- You've had a rained-out Saturday that cost you a quarter of your season's revenue.
- You sell a bundle (maze + hayride + barnyard) rather than just pumpkins by the pound.
- Your county or insurer has started asking about capacity limits.
- You spend more than an hour a week answering "do we need to reserve?"
If you're a 10-acre patch where people drive in, pick a pumpkin and leave, you probably don't need it. A clear "no reservations needed, pay at the wagon" line on your website does more good. If you run a maze, hayrides and a food stand on 40 acres with 400 cars on a peak day, you need it.
The capacity math
Before choosing a platform, work out how many people you can actually handle per hour. Most farms guess high.
Start with the bottleneck. On most Upper-Midwest farms that's one of three things: parking spaces, hayride seats, or the maze entrance. Work out each:
| Bottleneck | How to calculate | Example (a mid-size farm near Northfield) |
|---|---|---|
| Parking | Spaces × turns per hour (average stay is 2–2.5 hours, so ~0.4 turns) | 150 spaces × 0.4 = 60 cars/hour ≈ 200 people/hour |
| Hayride | Seats per wagon × wagons × trips per hour | 30 seats × 2 wagons × 2 trips = 120 people/hour |
| Maze entry | Comfortable entries per hour (groups of 4 every 2 minutes is about 120) | 120 people/hour |
| Gate / checkout | One cashier handles roughly 40–60 transactions per hour | 2 cashiers ≈ 100 groups/hour ≈ 300 people |
Your hourly capacity is the smallest number, in this case 120 people. Set your ticket slots at 80% of that to leave room for walk-ups and late arrivals: about 95–100 tickets per hour slot.
Then compare with demand. If last year's best Saturday brought 1,800 people and your capacity is 100 per hour across an 8-hour day (800), you have two choices: raise capacity (a third wagon, a second maze entrance) or accept that you'll sell out peak days and push the overflow to Fridays and Sundays with pricing. Most farms do some of both.
Platform options
You have four realistic routes. Prices below are what they publish as of this writing; check current rates before deciding.
| Route | Typical cost | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| General ticketing (Eventbrite, TicketSpice, Ticket Tailor) | Free-to-list, 2–4% + $0.50–$1.50 per ticket, usually passed to the buyer | Farms that want something running by next weekend | Generic branding, buyers get marketing from the platform, weak support for per-pound add-ons |
| Agritourism-specific (platforms built for farms and attractions) | $0.75–$1.50 per ticket or a season fee of several hundred to a few thousand dollars | Farms with multiple attractions, season passes, group bookings | Longer setup, contracts that run by season, sometimes exclusivity on fees |
| Your ordering platform's events module (Square, Shopify with a ticketing app) | Card processing (~2.6–2.9% + 10–30¢) plus app fees | Farms already using one of these for the farm store | Timed slots and capacity limits can be clumsy; test it before you commit |
| Booking software (Acuity, SimplyBook, or the booking tool in your website plan) | $15–$50/month flat | Small farms, 2–3 slots a day, school groups | Not built for 400 tickets in an afternoon; can feel like booking a haircut |
Our general advice: if you already use Square or Shopify at the gate, start there. If you don't, a general ticketing platform costs you nothing until you sell a ticket, and you can switch next year once you know your numbers. Only go to an agritourism-specific platform once you're selling more than about 5,000 tickets a season and the per-ticket fee math starts to favor a season fee. We cover the full comparison in best ordering platforms for farms compared.
Whichever you pick, the ticket link must live on your own site, on the home page and the hours page, as a button, not a sentence. Visitors should never have to find your Eventbrite page by searching for it.
Pricing that moves people off Saturday afternoon
The point of timed entry isn't just capacity. It's that you can price time. Three patterns work consistently on farms we talk to:
1. Weekday / weekend split
The simplest. Weekday or Friday admission at roughly 60–70% of the Saturday price. On a farm charging $14 on Saturday, $9 on Friday reads as a deal to a parent with a preschooler, and your Friday goes from 80 people to 300.
2. Peak-hour premium
Keep the weekend base price, add $2–$3 to the 12–2 and 2–4 slots. You're not raising prices; you're telling people the 10am slot is cheaper. A surprising number of families will take 10am and be gone by lunch, which frees parking for the afternoon.
3. Online vs. gate
Online ticket $12, gate $15. The $3 gap pays the platform fee and gives people a reason to commit in advance. Once 60–70% of your tickets are bought online, Saturday morning at the gate stops being a crisis.
A few things to avoid:
- Don't go below the gate price you charged last year for your best slots. Discounting peak time is leaving money in the field.
- Don't offer more than four price points. Adult / child / under-2 free, plus a weekday rate, is plenty. Seniors, military, and "twilight" rates all sound nice and all confuse the parent on their phone.
- Round to the dollar. $12, not $11.50 and not $12.99.
Children, add-ons and bundles
Decide what the ticket includes and state it in one line on the ticket page and on your website: "Admission includes the corn maze, hayride, barnyard and play area. Pumpkins, food and pony rides are extra."
Charge for children from age 3 and up at roughly 70–80% of the adult price, or just use one price for everyone over 2. One price is easier at the gate and in the ticket flow.
Add-ons that work well as online upsells: a pre-paid pumpkin voucher ("$10 pumpkin credit"), a cider-and-donuts bundle, a parking pass if you charge for parking. Add-ons that don't: anything priced by weight, since you can't weigh it online.
Season passes work for farms within 30 minutes of a metro area (the Twin Cities, Madison, Des Moines, Grand Rapids). Price them at roughly 2.5× a single weekend admission and sell them before the season opens.
The weather and refund policy
This is the policy that decides whether timed tickets save your season or create a hundred refund emails. Write it before you sell the first ticket, and put it on the ticket page, in the confirmation email, and on your website.
The policy that works for most farms:
- Open rain or shine. Light rain doesn't close the farm. Visitors are encouraged to bring boots.
- If we close (lightning, high wind, flooded parking), we post by 8am on the website and Facebook, and every ticket for that day becomes valid for any other day this season. No action needed.
- No refunds for weather, but free rescheduling. Any ticket can be moved to another slot up to the morning of the visit, by the customer, through the ticket link. No emails.
- Unused tickets at season's end are not refunded. Say this clearly. If you want to be generous, offer a credit toward next season.
Two details that matter: the platform must let customers reschedule themselves (most do; check before you sign), and "valid any day this season" must mean any day, including the Saturday before Halloween. If you make an exception, you'll spend the week explaining it.
Running the gate
Online tickets only help if the gate is faster than the line. What works:
- A separate "online tickets" lane with one person scanning QR codes on a phone. Most platforms' scanner apps work offline once you've loaded the day's tickets, which matters when the farm has one bar of signal.
- A second lane for walk-ups with a card reader and a printed price sign.
- A sign at the lot entrance, before people park: "Buy tickets now, skip the line" with a QR code to your ticket page. This alone moves 10–20% of walk-ups online while they're sitting in the car.
Keep the printed price sign at the gate matching the website to the dollar. Mismatch is the fastest route to a bad review.
Measuring whether it worked
After your first season with timed entry, look at four numbers:
| Number | What you want to see |
|---|---|
| Share of tickets sold online | 50%+ in year one, 70%+ by year two |
| Peak-slot sellouts | Peak slots full most Saturdays; if never, your capacity is too high or your price too low |
| Friday and Sunday attendance vs. last year | Up noticeably if weekday pricing is doing its job |
| Weather-day revenue | Money in the bank on a rained-out day that would have been zero |
If the online share stays below 30%, the ticket link is too hard to find or the online price isn't cheaper than the gate. Fix the website before changing the platform.
What this means for your website
Timed entry only works when the website does three things: puts a "Buy tickets" button on every page (not a link in a paragraph), states the price and the weather policy in plain words before the customer clicks through, and shows today's status so nobody buys a ticket for a day you've closed. The ticketing platform handles the payment. Your website handles the decision. Most of the farms that come to us frustrated with ticketing have a fine platform and a website that hides it.
If you're adding timed entry this season, our Harvest plan ($2,995 setup, $79/month) includes setting up the ticketing platform of your choice, the buy-tickets buttons, the policy page, and a status banner you update from your phone, with a first draft in about ten business days. See what we build for agritourism farms or compare plans.