The Problem:
I have season tickets to a sports team. I always split them with others. There’s no easy way to equitably and efficiently split the tickets.
If you’ve never gone through this process, more goes into splitting tickets than it might first appear. John doesn’t want Friday games. Suzy only like the Yankees. Everyone wants to go to opening day. Etc, Etc.
The Business
An online tool for splitting season tickets. Schedules are preprogrammed. Any number of season ticket splitters can “draft” tickets. Certain games can be included/excluded in the draft. Certain games can receive custom splits. Rules can be set so individual splitters don’t receive too many of a certain team. Basically, every tool necessary to make sure a group can equitably and efficiently split a season’s worth of tickets to their favorite team.
The service is a perfect compliment to Stubhub. Naturally, you will find some tickets need to be sold and other tickets need to be purchased.
Ultimately, the service doesn’t do anything except help facilitate and/or decide who gets which games. The result is simply a printout.
Doableness
Good programming is needed. (Don’t I always say that? It’s no wonder these programmers salaries only continue to rise.)
Then you need good partnerships with sports franchises.
My Thoughts
It’s more than just drafting tickets. It’s corporate ticket management as well. I can’t believe no one is doing this yet.
(Side note: Ebay paid, if my memory serves me correctly, $265M for Stubhub. In retrospect, doesn’t that seem like a song?)
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
too late buddy.
http://public.splitseasontickets.com/
Sam,
Thanks for the heads up. I checked out the site. Splitting season tickets is absolutely a service I need. However, splitseasontickets.com does not “have my team.” It looks like this site has done some excellent work truly partnering with a number of sports franchises. But why not make the functionality of splitting season tickets available for any team? The site doesn’t need a partnership to make that happen.
Also, “too late” is a myth. “Can I currently solve the problem more effectively and will I be able to continue this advantage in the future” is the question. Splitseasontickets has excellent potential. The site needs work – better user interface. I think their model might be slightly flawed as well. If they’re relying on sports franchises to promote them and to be their monetization model, I think they’re making a mistake. The team can just chop up the packages themselves. In fact, they do. Ticket management should be the underlying focus and goal, not ticket sales.
I don’t mean to hate – I need them or someone like them to succeed so my need can be met.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/DDVYHVV
Perhaps you would be interested in this project.
Hello.
I have been thinking about this for a couple of years now. Last year I was able to use splitseasontickets.com for my Rockies season tickets. It did a very good job, IMHO, helping me find partners, but also for performing the draft. It even worked with my version of the draft which I think is unique, if you can believe it.
Unfortunately, the Rockies, and seemingly almost every other team, decided not to renew their relationship with splitseasontickets.com this year. Instead, they picked up a relationship with a company that helps find partners, but doesn’t do anywhere near as good of a job, IMHO, and completely ignores the draft side of the problem.
After talking to the attorney for the Rockies, it sounds like one of the biggest problems in implementing this solution is the stranglehold the teams and Major League Baseball has on using their names, logos, etc. As an attorney yourself, what are your thoughts on how far they can reach?
Did you ever find another site that allows for creating a draft for your season ticket pool?