Comp

Short for complimentary, a seat given away rather than sold. Sponsor representatives, speakers, podcast guests, volunteers, media and organizers all normally hold comps, and at community scale they add up to a real slice of the room. A comp costs you twice over. It removes a seat you could have sold, so it shrinks your ticket income, and it still eats the per-head soft costs, because a comped guest drinks the water, wears the badge and takes the programme. That is why comps get counted before ticket prices are set, not after, so the income line is built on the seats that are genuinely for sale. Comps are also the reason your registration number and your capacity number are never the same conversation. They are worth giving, they just need to be visible in the budget rather than discovered in it.

Source: Standard event and hospitality usage; the term appears across event glossaries as the shorthand for complimentary registrations. The budgeting consequence comes from two places in this course’s primary texts. DevOpsDays treats comped and free tickets as a planning problem, noting that giving away large numbers of free tickets lowers your real attendance rate and makes logistics harder to plan, and it counts sponsors, speakers, organizers and volunteers separately from expected ticket sales when checking registration health. The Whova Event Insider budgeting panel supplies the other half, the hard versus soft cost split that explains why a free seat still carries a per-head cost.

First used in: 1.4 · The money: three-tier budgeting.