Industry News

Nashville Predators benefit from ticketing rethink

The Nashville Predators NHL team has re-established a home advantage when playing at Bridgestone Arena after causing the number of tickets resold via secondary sites to be slashed.

The Predators decided to act in 2015 as a response to away fans regularly filling more than half their 17,000-capacity home arena.

According to Venues Today, the Predators formulated a change to its ticketing strategy, and have moved from having one of the highest number of tickets available on the secondary market in the NHL to next to last in the 31-team league.

The Nashville team focused on selling season tickets to known customers, with sales staff requiring manager approval before selling more than four passes to a single party. If someone from out of the area requests season tickets, the team researches who they are.

“The fan base understands what we are trying to do and why we are doing it,” said Nat Harden, the team’s senior vice-president of ticket sales. “To build a home-ice advantage we had to build an atmosphere of 95 per cent Predator fans.

“We were losing our home-ice advantage,” said Nat Harden, the team’s senior vice president of ticket sales. “If we sell season-ticket packages to fans, we can maintain the home-ice advantage. We made a concerted effort not to resell to ticket brokers.”

Around 13,500, or 80 per cent, of the seats at Bridgestone Arena are now taken up by season-ticket holders.

The team also shifted from hard and paper tickets to season-ticket ID cards, helping reduce the deluge of tickets floating about without any way to track them. As they sought to constrain the influence of ticket brokers, the team also shifted to a fully mobile ticketing platform.

“We have made huge strides,” Harden told Venues Today. “Going in you hope that it works and you have a plan to be where we are at right now. I am really, really proud of where we are. We put together a plan to control the secondary market and to implement it to where we are now. We are very excited.”