Quote:
Originally Posted by Southside
Options were plenty this year. Definitely not buying that 97 per cent figure.
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As others have pointed out, with even a few hundred available seats, once everyone starts moving it "looks" like a lot more is available simply because at any given time, there will always be a few hundred available. But they're just being rotated amongst the same people. I pick new seats, and suddenly mine are available to the next guy.
I can only really speak for what I managed to see personally. Out of the 4 green sections that I asked about (202, 208, 216, 222) there was exactly one pair of seats available. And out of the PL rows 1-3, I roughly estimate just over 800 seats total. We saw what appeared to be about a dozen pairs available, or 24. Our agent did a large search over the entire area of interest, and let's just say she didn't seem bright enough to think that she needed to hide her search results from me, lest I report that the Flames have lost so many STH.
24/800 = exactly 3%. And these are some of the more coveted seats (at least in terms of the cheap seats).
Not sure where you guys are seeing much higher. They were certainly not offering 10% of the building up. Not even remotely close. Listening to the guys at the other ticket windows in white, red, etc, they seemed to have one, two, max 3 pairs of tickets per section and colour choice combo. And some of these guys spent quite a while going through all possible options throughout the Dome. I heard the same seats being offered to 2 different people within a matter of minutes.
I think the 99% renewal rates in the past have masked just how few seats were ever available to move to. Now that a whopping 5, 6, 7 hundred are available, it *seems* like there's just oh so many being given up. But it's still damn close to the published numbers. 600 available seats out of even 15,000, because yeah the Dome isn't entirely STH, is still only 4% - so a 96% renewal rate. So they fibbed by a percent or two at worst.
There certainly have been more individual tickets available, pretty much every year since 2006. Beyond the steady STH crowd (which the Flames increased when they opened up some more of the Black seats to STH back in 2010), fan demand just seems a lot less every season. But there's still a waiting list for seasons, and in most cases people are on it for a few years. So it's not like they're desperate (yet). I'd actually be curious to ask the folks on this forum - when did you get on the STH list, which section, and how long were/have you been on? I got on in 2010 and it took precisely a month before being offered my first tickets - I had fantastic timing with the newly opened Black sections in 2010.