Growing game day revenue by price-optimizing season tickets

Challenge

There’s a huge appetite for entertainment experiences across the United States, and live sport provides some of the very best. However, knowing exactly at what level to price tickets – maximizing a key source of game day revenue while still offering fans value-for-money – presents a tricky commercial decision for sports rights-holders.

Insight

A major league sports franchise was faced with a nice-to-have problem: season ticket sales were strong but, following multiple years of below-league-average price increases, there was a missed opportunity to grow ticketing revenues.

Solution

By gaining a deep, data-driven understanding of the franchise’s past and present season-ticket purchasers, Two Circles would be able to provide actionable insights to help the franchise optimize its ticket-pricing structure in a way that truly reflected the market value.

Action

Two Circles consulted with a number of stakeholders, from Customer Service ops team to executive decision-makers, to gain a qualitative understanding of the fan dynamics of the venue. Using three years’ worth of season, single game and secondary market ticket sales, Two Circles then created a proprietary model to calculate the true value of every seat in the franchise’s stadium, and ran an analysis of the demographics of ticket-buyers to gauge the price sensitivity of season ticket-holders by area.

Ultimately, Two Circles arrived at a recommendation – which included price reductions in some areas – that best reflected the missed opportunity, while not outpricing or exploiting the team’s biggest fans. This recommendation was put into practice in time for season ticket renewals, resulting in a 15% increase in season-ticket revenue with no loss in retention compared to the average of the last five seasons.