The Cost of High-End Sports Fan Experiential Packages: Will It Price Out the Average Fan

The million-dollar question for sports teams in the present time is how to provide a premium experience without breaking the bank for fans! Sports teams are looking for ways to enhance the fan experience and increase revenue through fan experiential packages. Although the idea of a VIP experience may sound appealing, it begs the question of who is going to foot the bill? 

Elevate Sports Ventures (a company that provides sports and entertainment consulting services) has been hired by the ACC to help with this mission. They have started working on an initiative of creating new high-end ticket and experiential packages – intending to optimize fan experiences to maximize ticket revenue streams. Despite fan experiential packages giving the impression of being a positive initative, it seems as there is one challenge: to do so without pricing out the average fan. And that brings up the question: will such packages make sports events less accessible for the average fan? 

Elevate Sports Ventures has a ticketing arm, Dynamic Pricing Partners, that will work with the ACC to create efficiencies within ticket pricing, scaling, sales, and distribution. The objective is to build comprehensive pricing studies, and strategic action plans in order to ultimately maximize ticketing revenues for collegiate and professional sports teams. With dynamic pricing, the cost of tickets can fluctuate based on supply and demand. 

In addition, there is always the secondary market, where fans can buy and sell tickets to games they are unable to attend. Elevate Sports Ventures will become the ACC’s preferred secondary ticket market reseller. This could provide an additional revenue stream for the ACC while making tickets more accessible to fans who may be unable to purchase them at face value.

How will this whole initiative play out and how successful will this initiative be? 

According to industry expert Tod Caflisch, Founder of TechFoundry LLC, Elevate Sports will produce an independent report on the state of revenue at the conference and explore alternative ways to increase revenue beyond ticket sales. He expects the ACC to leverage these opportunities to improve revenue while avoiding significant ticket price increases. Here’s more of what he says.

Tod’s Thoughts

“Regarding the ACC hiring Elevate Sports Ventures to help with ticketing strategy. This may be a reaction to Clemson and Florida State wanting a bigger piece of the revenue pie. They believe, as they are the major draws in the conference, that they deserve a bigger share. maybe deservedly so. I think that’s why the ACC is bringing Elevate Sports on board to produce an independent report on the state of revenue at the conference. I believe they will also look into ways to generate higher revenue without ticketing, which is not surprising — especially if Clemson and Florida State jump conferences, and they’ll need data to attract other big name schools to backfill those lost teams.

What will be surprising is if they don’t look at other ways to generate more revenue, as there are quite a few out there as far as monetizing opportunities during their events. I believe they’ll be able to leverage existing and new corporate partnerships as well to improve the fan experience to avoid dramatically increasing ticket prices.

Currently, many schools are doing or planning capital projects to improve their stadiums and other facilities to up their fan experience, and improve recruiting in light of a lot of recent and future conference transitions. Getting a better handle on their ticket, and secondary market will help as well. By partnering with a service like StubHub, they’ll be able to keep track of the secondary market and have better insight into who is using their tickets, allow them to market to those ticket buyers and potentially adopt them for direct ticket sales – which they’re always looking to do and offer discounts and other opportunities that using scalpers don’t provide.”

Article written by Azam Saghir.