Post by TheShadow on Feb 15, 2006 19:25:47 GMT -5
View the Price Plan
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insidebayarea.com
With PSLs gone, team hopes to entice fans with wider range of seat prices, starting at $26 per game
By Paul T. Rosynsky, STAFF WRITER
OAKLAND — With control of tickets entirely in their hands, the Oakland Raiders on Tuesday announced myriad changes in how seats will be sold this year and how much they will cost.
As the post-Personal Seat License era begins for the team and its fans, more choices will be available for those seeking tickets since the team divided the McAfee Coliseum seating map into eight price levels.
While the old configuration had only three price levels ranging from $46 to $70 plus several surcharges, the new plan calls for a range that will include tickets as low as $25 per game to as high as $100 plus a $1 per game public benefit charge.
The new ticket scheme will decrease the average out-ofpocket expense for fans to $65.60 per game from $67.31 for those who owned a PSL.
While the new plan will give fans more opportunities to see the Raiders for less money — in some cases cheaper than seeing the Stanford Cardinal or California Bears for the season — seats near the 50-yard line will cost more.
Overall, however, the Raiders said 65 percent of the ticket inventory will see a drop in price.
"This is very significant. It enables the fan to make choices," said Amy Trask, the Raiders chief executive officer. "We want a home-field advantage for our team."
It is an advantage the team has sorely missed the last 11 years as fans revolted against a PSL concept that charged them between $250 and $4,000 just for the right to buy season tickets each year.
In addition to the one-time PSL charge, a $7 per ticket maintenance fee was added, as was a $1 per ticket public benefit charge. The public benefit charge goes to public school athletic programs and county social services.
As a result, PSL holders paid anywhere from $54 to $78 per ticket.
For those who refused to buy a PSL but bought season tickets, the ticket prices were even more extreme.
In hopes of regaining the funds lost by lack of PSL sales, Oakland and Alameda County added surcharges ranging from $10 to $30 to tickets sold without a PSL. That surcharge raised the average price of tickets to $67 to $91 per game.
Now, some fans who paid $67 a game a year ago will pay only $26.
On the other hand, some who paid $91 per game could now end up paying $96 to $101.
Roger Noll, professor of economics at Stanford University, who has studied the Raiders deal, said the new scheme sounds like a winner.
"This is evidence of what a bad idea it was not to have the Raiders in charge of seat prices to begin with," Noll said. "There is now something for everybody."
Despite the decreased prices in most areas, the new scheme might not appease die-hard fans who spent thousands of dollars over the years supporting the team through the PSL sales, Noll said.
"I'm sure there is going to be a lot of people upset," Noll said. "The people who have had the best tickets in the past are going to face a price increase, and maybe a political strategy that might have been slightly better was to give them a discount for the first year."
Trask acknowledged the team is concerned about past PSL holders but argued the team's incentives will benefit those fans first.
Those incentives include giving PSL holders first rights to buy tickets.
Starting today through March 15, only fans who kept their PSL through last season will have the right to buy season tickets for next season. They also will have the right to change their location and buy more seats then they have had in the past.
In addition, the team will give each PSL holder who buys new season tickets seven vouchers for $298 round-trip flights to Hawaii from Oakland on Hawaiian Airlines.
"Their rights have grown," Trask said. "The ethos here is to find a way to say yes. It's sort of a taste of things to come."
There were about 15,000 PSL accounts active through the 2005 football season, Trask said. That represents about 30,000 fans, she said.
Selling tickets will be a new concept for the Raiders.
Since the team returned to Oakland from Los Angeles in 1995, the city and county controlled ticket sales through the despised Oakland Football Marketing Association.
Technical and manpower issues at the association, coupled by a PSL concept that never took hold in the Bay Area, resulted in the Coliseum remaining half-full for many Raiders games.
It led to disputes between the team and its government landlord and eventually a $1.1 billion lawsuit that ended with a Sacramento jury awarding the team $34 million in damages.
Both sides reconciled late last year after Oakland and Alameda County officials agreed to scrap the PSL program in exchange for getting more revenue through parking receipts and concession sales.
The sides are now in negotiations over how the $34 million will be paid.
The deal also called for the Raiders to sell its own tickets.
Trask said the team has spent the last three months creating "from scratch" a new marketing and ticket sales team in hopes of filling every seat in the stadium with season ticket holders.
The team created a Web site to sell tickets, raidernation.com, and a new telephone number, (800) RAIDERS.
Should all the seats not get sold through season tickets, the team plans to sell individual game tickets at Raiders Image stores and through Ticketmaster, Trask said. A date for when individual game tickets will be sold has not been determined, she said.
How successful the new program is could go a long way in determining if two professional football teams can co-exist in the Bay Area.
In the past, a lack of sales was always blamed on the PSL. Now there will be nowhere to point the blame except at the program.
Trask acknowledged the importance of the program but said many more factors are involved in putting a successful team on the field.
"One of those factors are tickets, but it is not the only one," she said. "We are going to spend what we think is (needed) to get the job done."