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Originally Posted by Benched
I was wondering this too (earlier in thread) and was told that you lose capacity due to improved leg room, bigger walk ways, more concourse, etc.
So the building may actually be bigger, but you lose seats.
Not sure if that's true or if the arena is smaller/same size to squeeze it into the available land (which is my fear).
Honestly, without more info on the design and specs, it's all speculation at this point.
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I took note when King was asked about capacities, and said "between 19 and 20 thousand". I think he means between 18 and 19 thousand myself.
A good example of the cost of higher capacity is the Saddledome. The cheapest seats are the Sportchek zone, and those cost $26 through Sportchek. They get a wholesale price on that (they want to make money as well, otherwise there would be no point), so lets assume they pay the Flames $20 per ticket. If you ripped out 1000 Sportchek seats to reduce capacity to 18,300, the Flames would be losing only about $1.2 million in revenue over the course of the regular season, at most. And since we never came close to filling the 300s for many games last year, the real loss is well south of that. But they still had to pay to maintain those seats, to clean them, to heat the extra space inside the building because of them, etc.
So for the Flames, taking away low value seats creates a better fan experience (building always fuller), saves some costs, and helps keep supply and demand at better ratios for no significant loss in revenue. Building three or four more suites in the new facility would offset that entirely.