Quote:
Originally Posted by Fire
You would see hundreds of Calgarians flying down to watch the Flames play in Las Vegas. It would be a trip destination for any hockey fan.
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Hundreds of Calgarians fly to Vegas every day as it is. The problem is that hundreds of Calgarians are only hundreds of people. They won't make a dent in an 18,000 seat arena.
WestJet has 3 flights every day to Vegas, Air Canada has 1. If each flight has about 150 people on it, and each guest stays 5 nights on average, that's about 3,000 Calgarians in Las Vegas at any one time.
Even if you bump that number to 5,000 and assume every single one of them will schedule their trips specifically to go to a Flames game while they're there, it isn't even a third of a full-house. The Flames are one of the teams that would likely have the largest travelling fan-bases to Vegas.
History has shown (and not just in hockey), that you need a solid local base of ticket holders to have a successful sports franchise. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays are a good example from outside of hockey. They thought they'd be an easy sell with all the northeasterners who have moved to Central Florida and being in the same Division as the Yankees and Red Sox. What they discovered is that they get a bump in ticket sales when the Yankees and Red Sox are in town, but otherwise have consistently had some of the worst attendance numbers in the Majors.