I was thinking that one of the reasons why attendance at professional sports events have been dropping is the fact that the best seats are unavailable. I imagine that quite often, a fan who might be willing to pay a decent price for a seat close to the action find themselves unable to sit anywhere near it because corporate (and otherwise rich) season ticket holders have bought them all up, leading other fans with the nosebleed seats at what’s still a pretty steep price. However, often enough, those good seats are empty.
I was thinking that the following plan might get some more people in the stands:
Season-ticket holders are allowed, up to 6 hours before game time, to inform the team box office that they have no intention of attending that game, and will make their seat available. If the team is able to sell the seat, they split the sale price with the season-ticket holder (percentage to be determined).
Who loses here?
The team need not refund any money to the season-ticket holder for his season ticket, and gets to pocket their percentage of a second sale of the seat.
The season-ticket holder possibly gets back a little of the money that he already spent on a game he has no intention of seeing.
The fan who buys the ticket has the chance to be closer to the action than he would have.
Is there any downside to this plan? I’d love to send the suggestion to some teams, but I figured I’d first float it here to see if there are any holes in it I didn’t think of.
It sounds like a wonderful idea, but there are a few potential flaws:
Why should the team pony up the money to adminster the program? They have the seat sold regardless.
Are there really that many no-shows among season ticket holders?
If the rich and powerful are so rich and powerful, would they bother taking the time to call the team’s office just for the chance to make back a percentage of the ticket’s price?
I don’t know about other teams, but here in Dallas, the Stars are talking about doing just that. Out of 17,001 seats, over 16,000 are season ticket holders, and at any given weekday games, they’ve figured between 500 and 2000 seats empty. They haven’t worked out all of the details yet, so I can’t help you more, but at least you’re not the only one considering this.
Some teams do this already, particularly for games where they don’t expect a lot of people to show up. I’ve gone to baseball games in Detroit and Milwaukee and bought single tickets and sat a few rows behind home plate in areas where you get waiter service and all that other stuff.
I doubt the Lakers or Knicks will do this for their $1000 courtside seats however.
Well, naturally, it would have to be worth it for them. But also, I’m thinking that the ability to get more people in the stands, closer to the action, breeds fan loyalty which will result in many more sold tickets (and concessions). And one more thing: if the stadium looks fuller, they might be able to get more money for in-stadium ads.
Depends on the team, but in many cases, yes.
Again, it would have to be worth it for them. If they feel that it’s not worth their time, effort and/or money to make a phone call for that chance, then they won’t. But they’ve already paid for the ticket they won’t use, so they might consider it worth a shot.
And to the rest of you, thanks! I’m glad to hear that the idea is already out there.
Sounds like a great idea. How would you deal with duplicate tickets? I’ve never had season tickets anywhere, so I don’t know how the logistics of picking up the tickets works. I assume that the ticket holders have them in their hands well before the event - that they don’t all have to go to will-call. What if the ticket holder decided to go anyway and meet his brother-in-law at the seats? I’ve been to games where people from disparate sections congregated around the best ones. Sometimes the ushers noticed, more often than not they didn’t. Would the park care, seeing as they sold both tickets? What if the wife gave the tickets to the brother-in-law and the husband called in unknowingly? Or the corporate office did the same thing, not knowing that the CEO stopped in over the weekend to pick up a pair? Again, it sounds like a good idea, but I think that this is a wrinkle that would need to be taken care of.
As to the original post, it sounds like a great idea. It might even get some good seats out of scalpers hands.
According to Frank Deford’s NPR commentary this morning (6/14/00) the Knicks actually give away many of their expensive courtside seats to celebrities, so that the rich and famous can be seen attending games, without having to actually part with any of their own cash.
With one’s season ticket, one is assigned a PIN number. If a season ticket holder calls in and says he wants to do the sell option, he punches in his PIN number as confirmation. After that, the original season ticket is not honored.
The guy shouldn’t do it if he thinks there’s any chance he might want to make use of the seats. The seats are originally his to use or give up. If he actively gives them up and then changes his mind, it was his own wrong decision.
The ushers definitely notice if someone is sitting in the good seats and doesn’t seem like he’s supposed to. If there’s a dispute, the disputants will involve the usher, who will know to make the right decision…the re-sale ticket gets the seat.
As with the first response, there would be a PIN number to ensure that the person calling in to give up the tickets is authorized to do so. If more than one person has the PIN number, and there’s a dispute between them, that’s their issue to settle, not the team’s.
Speaking from the perspective of the season ticket holder, my company has season tickets to several of the sports around here (don’t get jealous, they aren’t particularly good seats.) Whenever they haven’t assigned the tickets for that night’s game, they get on the all-call button and offer them to the third caller or whatever. The employees find it a nice little perk, and the company uses its seats for every event.
We are having this problem with the new Blue Jackets hockey stadium. I thought that, if there were any seats by the midpoint, they could either: sell the tickets at a quarter or half price to people there, giving them a better seat -or- they could just let people take the seats. If the ticket holders aren’t there by half-time, there really is no reason for them to come. Besides, most of the tickets are held by corporations or rich people, who might let the seats go vacant or even read the paper during the game. What will happen when our team scores it’s first hat trick? Will the businessmen want top throw in $240 hats? I think not.
The Cleveland Indians are studying the no-show problem, according to a recent newspaper article, because they’ve had several seasons worth of sold out games and people get mad when they can’t go to the game but see empty seats (over 2000 of them one game). They haven’t yet decided what they are going to do, but they did discover that over 90% of the unused seats were either promotional tickets that people got free, or tickets where the season ticket holder, almost always a company, gave (not sold) the ticket to someone, usually an employee, who decided not to go. Free tickets are the Indians’ biggest no shows. The people who actually pay, usually show up or at least make some kind of arrangments for the use of their seats.
The once Fabulous but now only Great Western Forum in LA used to do something like this, at least for hockey. The season ticket office had a service where the season ticket holder could ask them to sell their ticket if the holder wasn’t going to use it. The office would sell the ticket for face value, and the holder’s account would be credited. The payoff for the Forum is that they’d usually give first preference to prospective season ticket buyers, so it was sort of an incentive. They had a list of all those people to whom they’d sent out season ticket information, and call them before turning the ticket over to the box office to sell.
I don’t know if they nicked the holder of the seats for a handling fee or not, but I can say that in the pre-Gretzky era, I got some great seats that I otherwise wouldn’t, because they were all owned by season ticket holders.
but I suspect something similar to what’s described in the OP MUST have happened, to my benefit, once.
I was in Chicago on business, and, as things often were at when traveling for my old company, did not know that I had the evening free until fairly late in the day–must have been after 3:00 local time.
I really wanted to see a Cubs game and called ticketmaster (or someone–don’t remember who it was, but it was NOT through the Cubs organization or Wrigley).
I asked for the best ticket they had. One ticket only.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that the ticket they sold me was something like one section to the right of home plate, second or third row. Field level. Best seats I’ve EVER gotten. Period.
By the way, I should mention, out of fairness, that the Cub fans I met were the most friendly and polite I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting (kind of ironic, considering I’m from LA, a nominal Dodgers fan, and you all remember what happened to the Dodgers…)
