Any suggestion that that the Sydney Swans have a plan to “force” people to buy more expensive seats by restricting the availability of cheaper seats is incorrect. To the contrary, the Club is striving to encourage as many people as possible to come to Swans games.
“All our sales promotions; the pricing of our cheaper seats and the availability of free public transport to ANZ Stadium games for example, are all about making it easier for more people to attend our games,” Swans Chief Executive Myles Baron-Hay said.
“We are about maximising crowds not making it harder for people to buy the tickets they want.”
The issue that was identified – cheaper seat options not being available for purchase until later in the week - is not extraordinary and normal practice within the industry. The fact is, seats in the various categories (e.g. platinum, gold, silver and bronze) tend to be made available for sale in batches. In other words, not all seats are put on the system at one time. Seats are released in batches to ensure an orderly sales process.
There are a number of reasons for this. Depending on the expected crowd, various parts of the ground are opened up. For example, only half of level six at ANZ Stadium was opened on Saturday night for the game against Hawthorn.
Bronze and silver seats were temporarily unavailable on the Ticketek website because at the time it was not known how many seats were free to be sold. The number of silver and bronze seats available was dependent on how many Swans memberships had been sold in the lead-up to the game, the number of four-match Superpasses sold and the number of “Welcome to AFL” tickets sold. As soon as those sales numbers were confirmed and seats allocated, bronze and silver seats were once again made available via the Ticketek website for sale.
The Club hopes this clarifies the ticketing situation that was reported on Sunday and thanks those members and supporters who attended the game on Saturday night at ANZ Stadium.
