The St. Louis Cardinals could generate significantly more online traffic from their secondary ticketing program in 2006 as more fans discover they can buy the scarcest ticket in town without having to pay scalpers’ prices.
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There are fewer seats in St. Louis to see Albert
Pujols play this year, so the Cardinals are pointing
fans to the Prime Seat Club. |
Busch Stadium, the Cardinals’ new $365 million ballpark, is all but sold out for the season. Team officials are informing fans that the Prime Seat Club is the safest way to buy tickets if they were unable to purchase them through regular outlets.
The third-year program provides season-ticket holders the opportunity to resell tickets they don’t use through the Cardinals’ Web site and recoup the money they might otherwise lose if the team did not provide the service, said Joe Strohm, the team’s vice president of ticket sales.
The Cardinals charge a one-time $35 membership fee for ticket buyers to join the Prime Seat Club and charge buyers a 20 percent fee for each ticket sold through the program. The team shares that revenue with Major League Baseball Advanced Media and Tickets.com, its ticketing vendor.
Season-ticket holders receive a complimentary membership and are not charged for reselling their tickets. About 6,000 people have paid the fees to buy tickets and 8,000 season-ticket holders have been using the service in a little more than two years. Strohm said the program has grown every year and he expects those numbers to increase this season.
“The reason we started it was really as a benefit for the season-ticket holders, for them to have the ability to sell tickets that, quite frankly, in a lot of cases in the past may have gone unused,” he said.
The Prime Seat Club moved more than 50,000 Cardinals tickets in 2005. The program is a relative bargain for ticket buyers because selling tickets above their face value is illegal in Missouri and fans don’t have to pay what could be much higher prices to licensed brokers or people selling tickets on the street.
The new Busch Stadium contains 6,370 fewer seats than old Busch. The stadium’s reduced capacity has placed a burden on the team as Redbird Nation searches for alternative ways to pass through the gates, and counterfeit tickets are a problem, said Mark Lamping, Cardinals president.
“The good news is that we’ve sold all our tickets,” Lamping said. “The bad news is that we have a whole different set of customer service issues to tend to.”
As of last week, 26 of the 30 MLB teams had their own secondary ticketing programs and three more teams could join the list this season, said Noah Garden, MLBAM’s senior vice president of e-commerce. The Blue Jays, Reds, Twins and Yankees are the holdouts, Garden said. The teams charge an average of 20 percent to 25 percent above the ticket cost, he said.The San Francisco Giants, the first team in major league sports to start a secondary ticketing program when they debuted Double Play Ticket Window in 2000, allow season-ticket holders to set the price in reselling tickets. The Giants charge the buyer and the seller a 10 percent convenience fee on top of the ticket price and split those fees with MLBAM and Tickets.com.
Double Play moves about 100,000 tickets annually, said Russ Stanley, the team’s vice president of ticket services and client relations.
“When we started it, 29 other ticket guys thought I was crazy,” Stanley said. “Their thinking was ‘you sold a ticket once, why sell it twice?’”
The Giants have maintained their season ticket base at 28,000 in part because season-ticket holders know they can afford to buy all 81 games and have Double Play to fall back on to sell the tickets they won’t use, Stanley said.
“The days of having a deskful of tickets are over,” he said.
