Client Challenge
Identify brokers/frequent re-sellers so a strategy can be put into place regarding how to treat these ticket holders.
The club was missing out on revenue for sales above face value while pricing for available inventory is being undercut in other areas. Most of the re-sale activity (68%) involved fans from opposing teams. Brokers continued to expand their footprint in the most desirable seats
Project Objectives
- Analyze 3 years of ticket transfer and resale activity.
- Incorporate first-hand knowledge from Sales & Box Office.
- Create a scraping program and SQL match-back procedures to extract and match section and seat numbers from 3rd party re-seller postings (e.g. Stub Hub).
- Additional efforts: inferred matches program to assign confidence levels.
Strategy
- Used key metrics to flag seats that became part of a phased approach to slow the expansion and reclaim prime locations.
- Determined a communication strategy.
- Provided a mechanism to the Box Office that identified and launched a broker mitigation strategy to incrementally take back control of this valuable inventory over several years.
- Automated the identification/alert process to update with real-time results.
Results
- Stopped the expansion and relocation requests of identified top brokers and ensured available prime seats went to fans.
- The system successfully identified spikes in secondary market visiting fan sales, and we were able to communicate to the coaching staff to enable the silent count during offense preparation for these games.
- Future efforts to reclaim ~1,500 broker seats are planned as team performance improves.