Friday 15 July 2016

New triumph for daft ideas department

One of Katrien Meire's innovations at The Valley has been to create a Daft Ideas Department. Its role is to think up ideas that will upset the fans even more than they are upset with the regime already.

This time it has excelled itself. Fans will have to pay an extra £2.50 to buy tickets at the ticket office rather than online. Even worse, prices will go up by £3 in the two hours before kick off: Fan friendly

I suppose the idea behind that is to encourage more fans to buy season tickets, given that sales have been poor (3,500 is one figure that I have heard). However, many fans don't want to buy season tickets under the current regime. In any case, there is always some 'walk up' traffic. There are people who just go to a few games a year and might decide, on the spur of the moment, 'I've got nothing on this afternoon. I'll go to The Valley and be bored there instead.'

It's not clear how this affects away tickets, but I would have thought that at many League One grounds you could turn up on the day and hand over some readies at the gate. Indeed, I believe that at Fleetwood Town you get a free cod throw in. No good for Charlton fans: we like haddocks.

The views of the Supporters' Trust on this development can be found here: Insulting

7 comments:

Simon Ratcliffe said...

Any half decent marketing dept knows you incentives customers to do the thing you would like them to do and that rewards their patronage. Not disincentives the think you don't want but they might want. How about discounted tickets if you buy online 2 weeks before a match or if you buy 2 games at once or for 5 or 10 games you get a bigger discount? The idea is to encourage the more casual non season ticket holder to be rewarded for going more often! But for this regime pissing customers off is the objective!

Si Jones said...

Even without opening her trap she manages to continue to alienate fans and make a pigs arse of anything she goes near. How much longer must we have to endure her complete incompetence and destruction of our club , a betting company on our shirt and a five quid handling fee for a ticket. As the flemish say Donder Op!

Jay said...

Sounds reasonable to me
If you buy an airline ticket or hotel room online in advance you can usually get a better price. One would imagine this is to encourage advance bookings rather than to penalise spur of the moment bookings.

Martin Cowan said...

Why not offer a discount to early bird purchasers rather than penalising those who purchase late? The latecomers could pay the real price, with the discounted incentive for advance booking.

Anonymous said...

Sounds rubbish Jay! One can clearly see that prices have not fallen for advance bookings, whereas later bookings are increasing in price, hence it is a penalty for late buyers. It reminds me of the Easyjet approach to sales, with the tickets rising in price closer to the date of departure. The big difference is that Easyjet has a high occupancy rate, so potentially demand exceeds supply; with a very low demand for advance tickets at The Valley, one would think that raising the price will be counter-productive. Watch away matches where possible, local non-league football at other times, until the regime has gone.

Unknown said...

Not a clever move. Shurely KM as a highly qualified Lawyer ( ? ) would have considered that the Club could be liable for unfair discrimation to the technophobes who are unable to book their tickets online or those who simply cannot afford internet access. Sadly gone are the days as a Londoner you could finish work on a Saturday Morning and then decide which match you wanted to attend.

Unknown said...

In the words of Michael Caine..hey lads I've got a great idea. Why not introduce admission prices by results. It's very simple..if The Addicks win the price increases by £1.00 per goal scored and if they lose you receive a refund by reference the same criteria. Season ticket holders could even receive a total refund in the event of relegation. This could be easily administered by credit/debit card. Perfectly in keeping with the neo liberal high tech world we now live in ! Discounts could be given for good behaviour,for example, not throwing stress balls onto the pitch !