The first rule of ticket sales is to keep your season ticket holders happy. Season ticket holders are your word of mouth advertising army, they love the team or they wouldn’t make the investment in season tickets.
These are the people who talk about your team every day at the water cooler, and with all of their friends on line. They retweet your tweets, and the like you on facebook. What would you do if they started leaving?
Many arena’s a moving toward a “seat license” sales structure these days. Its a gimmick to raise more money for arena’s and teams that simply aren’t making it at the gate financially.
In Sioux Falls, its being used to pay for the building of the new Denny Sanford Premier Center, the new home of the United States Hockey Leagues Sioux Falls Stampede. In a time when people are struggling to make ends meet, and teams are struggling to put butts in seats, its generally considered to be in poor taste to go back and ask your fan base for more money.
Thursday, the city begins selling personal seat licenses for 500 club seats in the center of the arena’s lower bowl. Owners of these $600 annual club seat licenses will have first dibs to buy tickets in that seat for any event, from concerts to hockey games.
This doesn’t mean that people have to pay the $600 annual fee to get hockey season tickets, because those can still be purchased through the team without the $600 fee. But it does mean that someone who wants that seat and is willing to pay the $600 fee can take that seat from the hockey season ticket holder.
This season, the Stampede led the league in attendance, drawing an average 4,256 fans a game and selling out nine nights.
While the Stampede have a great hockey fan base, and a new arena to call home, with new arenas come new costs. Unfortunately those costs have to be paid by someone, and it looks like the city wants its residents to pay for its new building which has some residents asking haven’t we paid enough?
Joe Hughes
