Ending the Empty Seat Scourge

(ATR) One of the disappointments in Rio de Janeiro was an all too familiar problem with seemingly every Olympics – too many empty seats at too many venues.

For stakeholders from the International Olympic Committee to Rio 2016 organizers to sponsors, the empty seats meant more than a lessened experience for the fans and athletes in the venues or for viewers watching around the world.

It meant a loss of tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Chris Burggraeve, a former Chief Marketing Officer at AB InBev, puts the number conservatively at more than $40 million, based on the number of unsold tickets as well as the additional revenue that would have been brought in through purchases of food, drink and merchandise by those who bought the tickets.

Burggraeve has teamed up with Jean-Sebastien Gosuin, an authorized ticket reseller for Belgium at the four Olympic Games between 2006 and 2012, to come up with a solution.

Gosuin has created a system to greatly reduce the number of unsold tickets.

The result is a company called Seaters. Burggraeve is the executive chairman and Gosuin the CEO.

"Whether it’s a World Cup, an Olympic Games, a Euro Cup, all these big events there’s a mismatch between supply and demand," Burggraeve explains to Around the Rings. "What Seaters technology can do now, and what technology has evolved to, is give the owner of the event – the IOC, UEFA or FIFA – the chance to match supply and demand much better under their control and also do price specificity if you want. You can actually gauge the willingness to pay of every seat that is available and see who in the public would be interested in that seat at what price. And you can make as many wish lists, as many queues, as you want. So that is the magic of Seaters."

Gosuin tells ATR the current system that features a last minute push for tickets is not the solution because most of the time there is little or no demand by then. He says that under this system there will always be a fair reserve of tickets available at the last minute but the majority of them will have been purchased well in advance.

Here’s how the system works. Seaters splits up the various stakeholders – the sponsors, the local authorized ticket resellers, the organizers, the athletes – for each event into what it calls "fan groups". The fan groups, which can be either private or public, are then offered a variety of ticket choices via "wish lists". All of the tickets are sold at no higher than face value. If all the seats at one price sell out, the remaining ticket prices can be adjusted up or down to match with demand.

The athletes' fan groups would most likely be private, since the athletes would want the tickets used only by friends and family. The authorized ticket reseller, on the other hand, would want to open a public group. In both cases, the people within the group would be offered tickets at a variety of price points.

Seaters also offers a way to manage expectations of the fans. This comes from a patented algorithm that can determine the likelihood of a fan actually getting the tickets he or she wants.

Using some imaginary numbers, Gosuin explains, "From this wish list at this price for this category, you are number 1,379 in the wish list and your likelihood to ultimately get the seat is 93 percent. So you will know a long time beforehand that there’s a high likelihood to have these seats at face value. We manage your expectations so that you don’t have to go on the black market looking for high priced tickets anymore because you know that with a chance of 93 percent that you will have your tickets."

The knowledge works the other way too. Gosuin, using a high demand event like the final of the 100 meters at the Olympics as an example, says that a potential ticket buyer would "know instantly they are number 270,000 and have only a three percent likelihood of getting a seat".

The company is only about two and a half years old but the results appear compelling.

Seaters has partnered with BNP Paribas, a major worldwide sporting sponsor, on more than 400 events, including last year’s Davis Cup final in Belgium.

Before using this new technology, Gosuin says BNP Paribas had an average of 18 percent of empty seats at these events. Since Seaters partnered with BNP, the events have had less than one percent of empty seats.

The company has also worked with the Memorial Van Damme, a Diamond League athletics event in Belgium, helping to get the venue sold out.

As for the Olympics, Gosuin says that "we’ve spoken with several people" in the IOC and that the company is also in discussions with several stakeholders from sponsors to organizers for the FIFA World Cup as well as the Olympic Games.

Written by Gerard Farek

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