SAN FRANCISCO’S AT&T PARK GOES LEED
Venues Today Pulse
Matt Gunn and Dave Brooks
The city of San Francisco is typically known as a bellwether to eco-consciousness.
But in becoming the first previously existing major league stadium to attain Silver Certification in Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), the San Francisco Giants had to address a number of environmental challenges. Existing facilities have to meet separate requirements from new buildings to achieve LEED certification.
“I think it’s infinitely harder for existing ballparks to effectively retrofit their facilities to incorporate current trends and technologies into their existing practices,” said Jorge Costa, Giants senior VP of Ballpark Operations. “And there’s also an awareness that has to be created with the vendors and the public in making them know of the changes.”
Since the first stages of planning LEED certification two years ago, Giants staff and AT&T Park vendors, including Centerplate, Pacific Gas & Electric Company and Linc Facility Services have made a concerted effort in evaluating everything from waste management, recycling programs, lighting, water usage and even products and packaging.
The systemic approach brought a new attitude to AT&T Park, even though it has won Major League Baseball’s Green Glove award for recycling the past two years. The seventh-inning stretch, for instance, now includes an announcement from Giants manager Bruce Bochy asking fans for help picking up recyclables. Ushers wearing “Green Team” vests go into the stands, collecting any recyclable items the fans have collected up to that point in the game.
“I think the public awareness and education is pretty key to succeeding, and getting the numbers,” Costa said.
The team also installed new compact fluorescent lights throughout the park, and built a solar energy system which it plans to soon deploy. Low flush toilets were installed throughout the park, along with a powerful new Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision HD Scoreboard, which is 78 percent more efficient than its predecessor.
The park also dramatically increased its waste diversion numbers, with 67 percent of the ballpark’s waste being diverted from going to the landfill through an aggressive recycling and composting program. At a couple points last year, AT&T Park reached as high as 70 percent waste diversion, Costa explained.
“It’s a difficult standard to achieve and you couldn’t get there without the awareness of the fans and staff and all of the vendors,” he added.
Costa noted a particularly strong relationship with Linc Facility Services, which handles the stadium’s HVAC and engineering, and Giants hospitality partner, Centerplate.
While he didn’t disclose the total expense for the project, Costa said it was costly. While ballparks like Target Field in Minnesota and Nationals Park in Washington were built with LEED certification in mind, Costa believes it was more difficult to achieve the high standard in a 10-year-old stadium.
Though the busy regular season schedule has kept Costa from speaking with many of his counterparts at other stadiums, he said sustainability has been a big initiative in Major League Baseball for several years.
“It’s about innovation and technology, good hard work, practices and awareness that are the key if you’re really going to try and accomplish this, and to maintain it long term,” Costa said.
Showing posts with label sf giants. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sf giants. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Monday, September 14, 2009
Qcue Introduces Dynamic Ticketing to Dallas Stars
Venues Today
Dave Brooks
Ticketing upstart Qcue has signed another deal to bring dynamic ticketing to a professional sports franchise. The Dallas Stars of the National Hockey League have signed an agreement to sell most of the American Airlines Center upper bowl using a yield-management model similar to the airline industry. Working with Tickets.com, the system allows the team to make real-time price changes based on demand, opponent and historical sales data.
The system is already in its second season with the San Francisco Giants, another franchise powered by Tickets.com. Qcue CEO Barry Kahn said his Austin, Texas-based company helped the Stars set the prices for their first 14 home games, which go on sale Saturday.
“That’s when the big change in price occurs,” said Stars Exec. VP of Sales and Marketing Geoff Moore, adding that tickets are released in batches of 14 every two months. Last season, nearly all tickets in the premium terrace were priced at $60. Now, less than 25 percent of tickets are priced that high. Tickets drop to $50 for an Oct. 30 game against Florida and go as low as $36 per ticket for games against Los Angeles or Calgary. A second game against Nashville on Oct. 14 was selling for $24 less than the opener against the same team.
“They definitely kept the fans in mind and came out of the gate with low prices that they expect to rise,” Kahn said, later adding that tickets “where underpriced across the board to reward those who purchased early.”
The strategy is to price the tickets low for the initial on sale and then slowly increase in price as more tickets sell. While he said the Qcue web-based application gave him the ability to make daily price changes, the team would more likely adjust their prices on a weekly basis.
“The technology actually told us to raise the price on a couple games, but we didn’t feel comfortable doing that,” Moore said. The goal is to sell more tickets and not necessarily to extract more revenue out of the same ticket. In Texas, the live experience of a packed hockey game is almost as important as the product on the ice, Moore said.
“And that’s a critical piece when you’re competing for entertainment dollars with football and other sports,” Moore said. “In a fragmented media landscape, it’s become very difficult to communicate offers to people through traditional media. We’re trying to make it as easy and simple as possible to understand our pricing. When we advertise, we can just push everyone back to dallasstars.com and they can check the price of the game for that date.”
Prices for the seats won’t drop below the season ticket value and Moore said the team expected to have a multi-year relationship with Qcue. Kahn said that Qcue’s earnings would be based on sales volume revenue benchmarks tied to increased sales.
“We have a strong sports market here in Dallas, and we have a growing hockey market. Our challenge always is to market our team and find the right value proposition for the sports fan,” Moore said. “Dallas fans like hockey, but they love football. Sometimes when you like something, then price and value become a strong part of whether people will buy tickets or not.”
Dave Brooks
Ticketing upstart Qcue has signed another deal to bring dynamic ticketing to a professional sports franchise. The Dallas Stars of the National Hockey League have signed an agreement to sell most of the American Airlines Center upper bowl using a yield-management model similar to the airline industry. Working with Tickets.com, the system allows the team to make real-time price changes based on demand, opponent and historical sales data.The system is already in its second season with the San Francisco Giants, another franchise powered by Tickets.com. Qcue CEO Barry Kahn said his Austin, Texas-based company helped the Stars set the prices for their first 14 home games, which go on sale Saturday.
“That’s when the big change in price occurs,” said Stars Exec. VP of Sales and Marketing Geoff Moore, adding that tickets are released in batches of 14 every two months. Last season, nearly all tickets in the premium terrace were priced at $60. Now, less than 25 percent of tickets are priced that high. Tickets drop to $50 for an Oct. 30 game against Florida and go as low as $36 per ticket for games against Los Angeles or Calgary. A second game against Nashville on Oct. 14 was selling for $24 less than the opener against the same team.
“They definitely kept the fans in mind and came out of the gate with low prices that they expect to rise,” Kahn said, later adding that tickets “where underpriced across the board to reward those who purchased early.”
The strategy is to price the tickets low for the initial on sale and then slowly increase in price as more tickets sell. While he said the Qcue web-based application gave him the ability to make daily price changes, the team would more likely adjust their prices on a weekly basis.
“The technology actually told us to raise the price on a couple games, but we didn’t feel comfortable doing that,” Moore said. The goal is to sell more tickets and not necessarily to extract more revenue out of the same ticket. In Texas, the live experience of a packed hockey game is almost as important as the product on the ice, Moore said.
“And that’s a critical piece when you’re competing for entertainment dollars with football and other sports,” Moore said. “In a fragmented media landscape, it’s become very difficult to communicate offers to people through traditional media. We’re trying to make it as easy and simple as possible to understand our pricing. When we advertise, we can just push everyone back to dallasstars.com and they can check the price of the game for that date.”
Prices for the seats won’t drop below the season ticket value and Moore said the team expected to have a multi-year relationship with Qcue. Kahn said that Qcue’s earnings would be based on sales volume revenue benchmarks tied to increased sales.
“We have a strong sports market here in Dallas, and we have a growing hockey market. Our challenge always is to market our team and find the right value proposition for the sports fan,” Moore said. “Dallas fans like hockey, but they love football. Sometimes when you like something, then price and value become a strong part of whether people will buy tickets or not.”
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Tickets.com Client Spotlight: San Francisco Giants
Baseball Tickets Too Much? Check Back Tomorrow
The New York Times
By KEN BELSON
Setting ticket prices to sports events requires that one hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Teams want prices high enough to cash in if they play well, but need them to be low enough to draw fans if they falter.
But because teams set their prices months before opening day and resist changing them later, they have trouble reacting to the unexpected, like the weather, winning and losing teams or, this year, the ferocity of an economic downturn.
The San Francisco Giants are experimenting with a possible solution — software that weighs ticket sales data, weather forecasts, upcoming pitching matchups and other variables to help decide whether the team should raise or lower prices right up until game day.
The Giants are the first major league team to test the software, which some industry analysts say could transform the way teams adjust to the ebb and flow of the season, not unlike how airlines, hotels and rental car companies — which also use dynamic pricing — adjust to changes in the travel industry.
Many teams have various ticket prices for the same seats, altering the dollar amount based on the opponent, the day of the week and the time of the year, but those variations are set before the season and not altered. The Giants, by being more fluid, are taking the concept a step further.
The system has the potential to change how fans shop for tickets and to win back the bargain hunters and die-hard fans willing to pay top dollar at resellers like StubHub.
“Consumers are already paying a multitude of prices on the secondary market,” said Dan Migala, the director of the graduate program in sports administration at Northwestern University. “Gone are the days of teams having just three or four ticket prices.”
Teams have looked at tinkering with prices at midseason for some time, but they have been reluctant to do so for fear of alienating season-ticket holders, who pay upfront for their seats and may be offended if fans sitting nearby paid far less for their tickets.
Still, discounts were hardly an issue in San Francisco. In the first eight years after they moved into what is now AT&T Park in 2000, the Giants regularly drew capacity crowds. If anything, they often wished they could raise prices.
“All those years when Barry Bonds was here hitting those home runs, what were we thinking?” Russ Stanley, the Giants’ vice president for ticket services, said as he ruminated on what might have been had the Giants altered prices from week to week as Bonds’s various home run pursuits intensified. “The world is ready for this.”
With Bonds gone and the Giants finishing last season in fourth place in the five-team National League West, attendance fell 11 percent, to below three million for the first time since 1999. Ticket sales so far this year are up 1.7 percent, but at one April game, attendance fell below 30,000 for the first time in the park’s history.
The Giants are not alone in trying to adjust to the recession. The Toronto Blue Jays have hosted “Messin’ with Recession” nights, when fans get tickets for as little as $5, hot dogs for $1 and discounted merchandise. The San Diego Padres are selling two-for-one tickets to some games. The Los Angeles Dodgers gave away “Mannywood” T-shirts to fans who bought seats in left field.
Like many teams, the Giants have tiers of ticket prices. The highest-priced “premium” games include opening day and the games against Oakland and the Los Angeles Dodgers during the summer. The next tier includes “feature” games against the Dodgers in April and weekend games during the summer. The lowest price level includes all other games.
The Giants’ dynamic pricing experiment affects 2,000 of the 41,000 seats at the stadium. The team chose four sections in the upper deck in left field with 1,200 seats and three sections in the left-field bleachers that typically are among the last to sell. No season tickets were sold there.
Because the seats often went empty, the team felt that cutting prices to as low as $5 could entice more fans to sit there. They in turn might buy hot dogs, beers and other concessions. Fans at AT&T Park spend on average $22 a game on food and merchandise.
Conversely, the team charges more for the seats — which are regularly $10 in the upper deck and $17 in the bleachers — when demand is high, like last weekend, when the Mets were in San Francisco.
For the game against the Mets on Thursday, a blustery night, the Giants shaved $1 off their upper-deck seats and $2 off their bleacher seats. But for the Friday night game, when the Giants’ ace, Tim Lincecum, was on the mound, the upper-deck seats went for $19 and the bleacher seats jumped to $27, including a $2 increase on the day of the game.
On Saturday, with Johan Santana paired against Randy Johnson, the Giants raised the price of bleacher seats to $33, including a $2 increase on game day; seats in the upper deck were again $19. On Sunday, bleacher seats went for $23 and sold out in a few days because Lincecum bobblehead dolls were given away.
Through the first 17 home games, sales of dynamically priced tickets rose 20 percent, compared with sales in those sections during the same period last year. That works out to about 500 extra tickets a game.
But it is unclear whether cheaper tickets alone helped boost sales, or whether the team’s improved performance and the mix of competitors, including the rival Dodgers, were responsible. The Giants also hosted a Filipino heritage night that drew a big crowd.
The team is also tinkering with the algorithm that it uses to determine the best time to lower or raise prices. Opposing pitchers and hitters are assigned values on a five-point scale. But if the highly regarded Cole Hamels of the Phillies does not pitch in San Francisco, the Giants may not raise prices when the team is in town.
A single group sale of 100 tickets may misrepresent fan interest. The Cubs draw well even when they are doing poorly. Each day, the calculation changes as starting pitchers are announced, team records change and tickets are sold, prompting the team to recalibrate prices.
Thus far, much of this is lost on the fans. Karla Marroquin, who lives in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, did not know the four upper-deck seats she bought last month had prices that were adjusted.
She originally wanted to attend the game on April 28, but when she saw the same seats the next night were a few dollars cheaper, she chose those.
“The pricing makes it worthwhile when you look at the overall cost of the game, the parking, the tolls, the food,” Marroquin said. “We used to go to the A’s games because of the cheaper prices, but now with the variable pricing, I might go to the Giants more often.”
Megan Romero, who lives in San Francisco, said she was also unaware of the new pricing system.
She bought her bleacher seats because they were the cheapest available. Now that she knows that other seats may be discounted, she said she would start hunting for bargains.
“It’s not the way I shop for things,” Romero said. “But if the ticket is all of a sudden $6 on a Wednesday night, I might decide to go.”
The New York Times
By KEN BELSON
Setting ticket prices to sports events requires that one hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Teams want prices high enough to cash in if they play well, but need them to be low enough to draw fans if they falter.
But because teams set their prices months before opening day and resist changing them later, they have trouble reacting to the unexpected, like the weather, winning and losing teams or, this year, the ferocity of an economic downturn.
The San Francisco Giants are experimenting with a possible solution — software that weighs ticket sales data, weather forecasts, upcoming pitching matchups and other variables to help decide whether the team should raise or lower prices right up until game day.
The Giants are the first major league team to test the software, which some industry analysts say could transform the way teams adjust to the ebb and flow of the season, not unlike how airlines, hotels and rental car companies — which also use dynamic pricing — adjust to changes in the travel industry.
Many teams have various ticket prices for the same seats, altering the dollar amount based on the opponent, the day of the week and the time of the year, but those variations are set before the season and not altered. The Giants, by being more fluid, are taking the concept a step further.
The system has the potential to change how fans shop for tickets and to win back the bargain hunters and die-hard fans willing to pay top dollar at resellers like StubHub.
“Consumers are already paying a multitude of prices on the secondary market,” said Dan Migala, the director of the graduate program in sports administration at Northwestern University. “Gone are the days of teams having just three or four ticket prices.”
Teams have looked at tinkering with prices at midseason for some time, but they have been reluctant to do so for fear of alienating season-ticket holders, who pay upfront for their seats and may be offended if fans sitting nearby paid far less for their tickets.
Still, discounts were hardly an issue in San Francisco. In the first eight years after they moved into what is now AT&T Park in 2000, the Giants regularly drew capacity crowds. If anything, they often wished they could raise prices.
“All those years when Barry Bonds was here hitting those home runs, what were we thinking?” Russ Stanley, the Giants’ vice president for ticket services, said as he ruminated on what might have been had the Giants altered prices from week to week as Bonds’s various home run pursuits intensified. “The world is ready for this.”
With Bonds gone and the Giants finishing last season in fourth place in the five-team National League West, attendance fell 11 percent, to below three million for the first time since 1999. Ticket sales so far this year are up 1.7 percent, but at one April game, attendance fell below 30,000 for the first time in the park’s history.
The Giants are not alone in trying to adjust to the recession. The Toronto Blue Jays have hosted “Messin’ with Recession” nights, when fans get tickets for as little as $5, hot dogs for $1 and discounted merchandise. The San Diego Padres are selling two-for-one tickets to some games. The Los Angeles Dodgers gave away “Mannywood” T-shirts to fans who bought seats in left field.
Like many teams, the Giants have tiers of ticket prices. The highest-priced “premium” games include opening day and the games against Oakland and the Los Angeles Dodgers during the summer. The next tier includes “feature” games against the Dodgers in April and weekend games during the summer. The lowest price level includes all other games.
The Giants’ dynamic pricing experiment affects 2,000 of the 41,000 seats at the stadium. The team chose four sections in the upper deck in left field with 1,200 seats and three sections in the left-field bleachers that typically are among the last to sell. No season tickets were sold there.
Because the seats often went empty, the team felt that cutting prices to as low as $5 could entice more fans to sit there. They in turn might buy hot dogs, beers and other concessions. Fans at AT&T Park spend on average $22 a game on food and merchandise.
Conversely, the team charges more for the seats — which are regularly $10 in the upper deck and $17 in the bleachers — when demand is high, like last weekend, when the Mets were in San Francisco.
For the game against the Mets on Thursday, a blustery night, the Giants shaved $1 off their upper-deck seats and $2 off their bleacher seats. But for the Friday night game, when the Giants’ ace, Tim Lincecum, was on the mound, the upper-deck seats went for $19 and the bleacher seats jumped to $27, including a $2 increase on the day of the game.
On Saturday, with Johan Santana paired against Randy Johnson, the Giants raised the price of bleacher seats to $33, including a $2 increase on game day; seats in the upper deck were again $19. On Sunday, bleacher seats went for $23 and sold out in a few days because Lincecum bobblehead dolls were given away.
Through the first 17 home games, sales of dynamically priced tickets rose 20 percent, compared with sales in those sections during the same period last year. That works out to about 500 extra tickets a game.
But it is unclear whether cheaper tickets alone helped boost sales, or whether the team’s improved performance and the mix of competitors, including the rival Dodgers, were responsible. The Giants also hosted a Filipino heritage night that drew a big crowd.
The team is also tinkering with the algorithm that it uses to determine the best time to lower or raise prices. Opposing pitchers and hitters are assigned values on a five-point scale. But if the highly regarded Cole Hamels of the Phillies does not pitch in San Francisco, the Giants may not raise prices when the team is in town.
A single group sale of 100 tickets may misrepresent fan interest. The Cubs draw well even when they are doing poorly. Each day, the calculation changes as starting pitchers are announced, team records change and tickets are sold, prompting the team to recalibrate prices.
Thus far, much of this is lost on the fans. Karla Marroquin, who lives in Petaluma, north of San Francisco, did not know the four upper-deck seats she bought last month had prices that were adjusted.
She originally wanted to attend the game on April 28, but when she saw the same seats the next night were a few dollars cheaper, she chose those.
“The pricing makes it worthwhile when you look at the overall cost of the game, the parking, the tolls, the food,” Marroquin said. “We used to go to the A’s games because of the cheaper prices, but now with the variable pricing, I might go to the Giants more often.”
Megan Romero, who lives in San Francisco, said she was also unaware of the new pricing system.
She bought her bleacher seats because they were the cheapest available. Now that she knows that other seats may be discounted, she said she would start hunting for bargains.
“It’s not the way I shop for things,” Romero said. “But if the ticket is all of a sudden $6 on a Wednesday night, I might decide to go.”
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Tickets.com Client Spotlight: Fresno Grizzlies
Fresno Grizzlies Set Attendance Record, Beat San Francisco Giants
The Fresno Grizzlies recently played an exhibition game with the San Francisco Giants on March 26, 2008. The Grizzlies won 4-3 and successfully shattered a stadium attendance record with over 14,000 fans. This was the largest crowd to ever watch a game in Fresno. Tickets.com congratulates the Grizzlies.
Watch the highlights video
The Fresno Grizzlies recently played an exhibition game with the San Francisco Giants on March 26, 2008. The Grizzlies won 4-3 and successfully shattered a stadium attendance record with over 14,000 fans. This was the largest crowd to ever watch a game in Fresno. Tickets.com congratulates the Grizzlies.
Watch the highlights video
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