FanPost

Big Crowd, Big Prices for Saturday’s Game

On March 29, I wrote a post about how dynamic pricing was working to that point. This is a brief update.

Before the season started, the Indians promised all ticket buyers, including those buying season tickets, that the ticket prices being charged for any given seats at the start of the season would be the lowest prices the team itself would charge throughout the rest of the season for those seats for the game or games for which the tickets were purchased.

In that same post, I noted that tickets for the Omar Vizquel jersey giveaway night—which will be this Saturday—looked like they would command premium prices:

Tickets to some premium games are a hot commodity right now. Earlier today I looked at the prices being charged on the team’s website and the prices being asked on StubHub for the Saturday, June 21 night game against Detroit. This game is Omar Vizquel jersey night (to the first 12,500 people). There are also fireworks and Hall of Fame inductions. Dynamic pricing for this game has already had an effect. The only seats the Indians have left in Section 131 are in Row DD (five rows from the back) and cost $74.50 each. Resellers using StubHub are asking $93.30 each for seats in Row C in Section 131 for this same game.

A few days ago, we sold our Section 131 Row A tickets for $125 each and our Row B tickets for $100 each on StubHub. I honestly think that if we had held out a little longer we could have gotten $10 more per seat. But these transactions clearly show the effect dynamic pricing is having both on the team’s revenues and on the ability of season ticket buyers to recover a disproportionately large amount of their initial outlay via some timely sales.

The team’s interactive seat selection chart shows that for the first time since the opener the team is selling seats in every section—with most sections already being sold out. Moreover, even seats in the furthest sections of the upper deck in left and right are being sold by the Indians for prices between $30 and $40. A look at the few random seats left in the more expensive lower deck sections shows that team is getting at least triple the price it normally gets for those seats for other games.

In sum, the Indians made certain promises regarding dynamic pricing. They are keeping them. And they are clearly deriving more revenue per ticket sold than they got before instituting this kind of pricing while helping their season ticket holders in the process.

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