Concerned about AT&T tickets
(Written by kencraw)
For the season ticket holders out there, they know that seat-picking time is around the corner. I wanted to give some of my thoughts on what’s about to happen.
First the positive:
I went to AT&T park for the promotional open house event. It was simple but well run and getting to walk the stadium was well worth the drive (my family combo’ed the event with a trip to the Exploratorium for the kids). Minus the left field corner seats where both the foul pole and the stadium structure make it hard to see the near endzone, there’s very few bad seats in the house. The lower deck, particularly the endzones have some depth perception problems because of how low they are (since it’s a baseball park), but overall, it’s pretty good, particularly on the upper deck, which was better than I expected.
Which brings me to my concern:
I believe that the University is significantly over expecting people to pay for expensive seats.
I’ve thought this for a while now, from the first instant I saw the seating/pricing chart. If you look at it, there’s a LOT of high priced donor seats and a fair number of seats that look to be the equivalent of the Blue/Gold zone and not much in-between. But my instinct grew stronger when I went to the stadium and was surprisingly happy with the upper deck (“view level”) seats.
But not wanting to solely rely on my instinct, I decided to see if they were really asking for too many people to pay donations for their seats. Not having exact seat counts for each section at both Memorial and AT&T, I had to guestimate, but based on how the sums worked out, my numbers probably aren’t too far off. I assumed each of the sections in Memorial had 1500 seats and each full section at AT&T had 500 whereas the smaller middle level was half that (BTW, that results in a Memorial capacity of 67K and 38.5K for AT&T). That results in the following table of seats:
| Seat Category | Memorial | AT&T |
|---|---|---|
| ESP | N/A | 3000 |
| $1200 donation | 3000 | 1500 |
| $600-$800 donation | 3000 | 8000 |
| $300-$400 donation | 3000 | 3750 |
| $150-$200 | 1500 | 2000 |
| $50-$100 donation | 3000 | 3500 |
| Reserved | 21000 | 6250 |
| Blue&Gold | 18000 | 6000 |
| Student | 6500 | 3500* |
| Young Alum | 3000 | 1000 |
| Visitor | 6000 | 2500 |
*The student section, being bleachers, is the section I’m least confident of the AT&T quantity. That could easily be 5K, but 3K is my best guess.
Obviously one would expect a number of sections to be smaller than their Memorial equivalent, so I’m not particularly concerned with the young alum, student or visitor section. The two that are troublingly small to me are the Blue & Gold equivalent (which is the white seats in the linked diagram) and the general reserved. While not all of the 21K reserved seats at Memorial were sold as season tickets, my gut feel is that the number is higher than 6K. Even more troubling is the Blue and Gold, which are PACKED at Memorial. They are reduced by more than half.
Are they really expecting these people to bump up into donor seats?
Then, if you look at the donor sections, they’re all larger in size. Of particular note is the $600 to $800 bucket, which is now 5,000 seats larger! And to be perfectly clear, I was generous in my groupings. Memorial didn’t have $800 donation seats, they had $600, so by grouping those two together, I’m already assuming some of the $600 donors are willing to up their numbers a little. I used that same grouping methodology across the entire table, assuming that many of the $300 will be willing to go to $400, the $150 to $200, the $75 to $100.
Even with that generous grouping the ONLY donor section that didn’t increase in size was the top-end $1200 level… but that’s because they’re the source of most of the ESP seats. So really if we were to group those two, that group would be rising in number too.
And here’s where this concern gets personal… or said another way, here’s where the concern ends up with a lot of ticked off people:
The seat selection process goes from the long term donors to the short term non-donors (which is perfectly fair). I fit somewhere in the lower middle third, a medium term non-donor. I’m around selection #25000 out of 40K. I get to pick on April 6th, when the first selections start March 14th. (Again, I think that’s fair.)
But what happens when all those bigger donors and longer season ticket holders decide to buy cheap seats? There’s nothing that mandates that they pay for the expensive ones. I see a domino effect where everyone keeps pushing out, section wise, picking cheaper seats than the University is expecting both because they don’t want to pay as much as the University wants AND because by they time they get to pick, the section they’d like to sit in is down to the last few bad seats from the higher donor groups. This is particularly true when combined with my earlier positive that there’s very few bad seats in the house. Why pay more when you can get a darned good seat for less?
In any case, as each group expands beyond their prior grouping, things will get worse down the line until when they get to me, there will be a ton of VERY expensive seats left and effectively no seats available in my price range. (This is particularly worrisome for me because I need 6 adjacent seats.)
I sure hope I’m wrong, but I’m quite concerned. How will the University respond when #39000, a guy with two Blue Zone seats goes to buy his tickets and all that’s left is $1200 donor seats. The guy was guaranteed seats as a 2010 season ticket holder, right?
March 11th, 2011 at 9:09 pm
Well written, Ken.
I don’t know if they’ll even get us low lying people to renew. Still not sure if I want to buy season tix this year. The line up is meh and I’m not a long time ticket holder anyway.
March 11th, 2011 at 9:17 pm
From the looks of it CBG, for the best seats in 2012, you’d be better off saving the season ticket money and making a $75 donation to the BearBackers. Assuming they use the same point system next year, you’ll get 5 points for that $75 and only a few points for the few years you’ll have lost by not renewing.
March 18th, 2011 at 2:49 pm
I am now the possessor of four seats in the view level, section 328… not too bad.
March 18th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
Good to hear Jason. All those years of paying into Bear Backers clearly has you well up on the donor list. I’ve still got another two and a half weeks to wait.
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:49 pm
Got my seats yesterday, pretty simple process. Went with View section 320, which seemed to have a similar view to section D or C in Memorial.
March 24th, 2011 at 2:30 pm
The process is a nightmare.
Don’t bother asking the ticket office. They are doing a Sgt. Schultz…..
“I know nothing…..”
Clearly these are people that don’t understand that you don’t raise ticket prices after a dismal season…..
And…
You might want to upgrade the product before you do so….
And…..
When you are selling a second rate product at premium prices at people may balk….
This is San Francisco…. Not Norman…. Not State College…. Not Iowa City…..
There are other things to do on a Saturday afternoon and you are in competition for my entertainment dollar.
March 26th, 2011 at 9:13 pm
The process was a nightmare? A tad melodramatic perhaps? I thought it was simple and efficient. I agree that prices may be too high but I could say that about almost every single thing I purchase every day. At least here I feel good about where my money is going to, compared to the multinational corporations that get most of my $$$.
If you’re so interested in doing other things on fall Saturday afternoons then go do it.
March 31st, 2011 at 10:27 am
What happens if the expensive seats ie: high “donation” fee seats don’t sell. Are they then going to put them up for sale on a per game basis to the public. This kind of sounds like what the Oakland Raiders did when they first moved back and couldn’t sell all of their PSL’s. People were able to buy tickets at the same price per ticket as those who bought into the PSL fiasco without having to pay the PSL fee.
April 4th, 2011 at 12:00 am
The concern for misplaced expectations re: sales of higher priced seats at AT&T may not be misplaced. At the same time, there are still about 5,000 seats remaining in sections with $0 donation (1,200 of those are in sections with obstructed views; Secs. 332-336).
The most expensive non-ESP seats (Secs. 125-127) with a $1200 donation still have about 1,000 seats or 52.7% of inventory remaining. Rivaling that number are $800 donation seats in Secs. 124 & 128, Secs 325 & 326 (~960 remaining, 52.3% of inventory).
Worst performers thus far, by far: Sideline Bleachers Sections A, B, and C. Between 90.9% and 95.8% of inventory is available in those sections. Abysmal sales record, to be sure.
Best sales record, thus far: seats with $200 donation (Secs. 121, 130, 323, & 328). Remaining inventory varies widely (between 2.7% and 18.4%), but as a group only 228, or 10.0% of inventory, remain.
Running a close second: seats with $50 donation and $225 season ticket price: Secs. 302 thru 319 in the lowest rows (lettered rows A-G). Approx. 139 remain or 11.5% of inventory.
It seems likely that with most remaining time slots belonging to people with double and single digit priority points, lots of the $0 donation seats will be snapped up this week. Even so, sales of seats with donations ranging up to $400 seems to be ongoing, albeit in modest numbers.
April 4th, 2011 at 9:16 am
Thanks for the analysis Fiat.
I must admit, that while what I was concerned about is happening, it isn’t happening to as bad a degree as I feared.
It seems to me that if the bleacher seats on the other side were a lower donation value (say $50-$200) and perhaps a few of the lower donation values on stadium side were lowered to non-donor seating, things would be just about right.
It would make a lot of sense, because for reasons I don’t seem to appreciate, the majority care more about being close to the good food than close to the action on the field. As such, from that perspective, the bleachers are as bad as Memorial. Personally, if I was the big-donor type, that’s where I’d be sitting.
December 13th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
[…] those who remember, I had my criticisms of the AT&T plan and my prediction turned out to be mostly correct. The cheaper seats were packed but the middle of […]
August 30th, 2012 at 8:49 pm
[…] result, as I predicted, was very low ticket sales particularly in the big donor sections and a half empty, very small […]