The Coyotes have rolled out two new ticketing initiatives in the past two weeks. YotesShare debuted on Monday, allowing fans to buy into four categories of micro-shares across five seating locations throughout Gila River Arena, i.e. smaller shares of season tickets at membership pricing. Coyotes VP/Innovation & Strategy Sam Doerr said that the club started to see a shift in millennial behavior amid the pandemic, pointing to the success of investing app Robinhood, and saw an opportunity to capitalize off of that momentum around ticketing while providing fans some monetary flexibility. For example, a fan can purchase a 5% micro-share of a Coyotes season membership for a lower-level seat. There’s a two-seat minimum and four-seat maximum. “We see the benefit of getting people involved at a lower level and a lower commitment and hopefully growing them into being a half-season member of a full season member,” Doerr said. “This gets them in the door.” Participating fans also receive a t-shirt, claim to be a season ticket member and receive priority access for playoff games, too. The Coyotes and L.A.-based app developer Season Share are working on developing the technology, which will be integrated into the new team app that will launch in the next month or two. Santa Clara-based VenueNext is designing the Coyotes new app. When next season's schedule is set, YotesShare users will draft through the app to select specific games. For example, if there are 20 fans in a YotesShare -- all who purchased 5% -- and 40 games to pick from, each fan will select two games.
STAYING FLEXIBLE: Last week, the Coyotes also converted their season ticket memberships to flexible spending accounts. It is an initiative the club’s AHL affiliate -- the Tucson Roadrunners -- launched earlier last month and received positive local feedback from fans, Doerr said. “What we’ve done is provide some flexibility from a financial standpoint but also from a health and safety standpoint for the consumer,” said Doerr, explaining that fans can pick and choose games. If during this next season, some fans don’t want to attend games but still have money in their flexible spending accounts, that money will roll over to the '21-22 campaign. Coyotes President & CEO Xavier Gutierrez said, “It’s important for our team to create flexibility and be mindful of the uncertainty that we’re in the middle of, but still try and generate revenue. ... We have a very strong desire as an organization to be innovative and to be forward-thinking in the way we do things as a club and the way we do things as a business enterprise.”
