Here’s another great guest post from Carlo
Thinking About Planning Ahead for a Mets Game? It Could Wind Up Costing You.
As soon as you log onto the tickets section of the Mets website, the team is urging you to plan ahead and purchase your tickets early for the inaugural season at Citi Field. And why shouldn’t you? Its a new year, and everyone is excited to see the new stadium, the new bullpen, and to try the new places to eat. And the Mets do an excellent job of making it easy for you to do. There are interactive maps with views from the seats, scheduales, price grids to help you plan, and best of all, you deal with the Mets directly, not Ticketmaster. A few clicks, a few minutes, and you and your family and friends all set for a day at the brand new ballpark.
What the Mets don’t tell you, however, is that buying your tickets online and in advance can end up costing you a lot more money, and offer you a much more limited seat selection. Here are a few reasons why:
1. Fees, fees, fees. You’re heading out with your girlfriend to see the Mets take on the Nationals, and, taking the advice of the Mets, you decide to plan ahead. Value oriented, you purchase $15 Promenade Resrved Infield tickets. Spending only $30 to see a game, despite the hard times, well, you can manage that without feeling guilty. The problem is that the tickets won’t actually cost you $15. For planning ahead, the Mets will thank you by tacking on a $5 service fee per ticket, and a $5 ordger charge for the entire order. In the end, you’ll end up paying $45 for two tickets; or, in other words, you get TWO tickets for the price of THREE. If thats not inentive to plan ahead, I don’t know what is.
And as the ticket prices go up, so do the service charges. If you’re spending around $30 a ticket, expect to pay near $7 in service charges per ticket, plus the $5 order fee. The service charges can reach up to $15 per ticket.
And if you really want to plan ahead for the entire season, do what I did, and purchase a 15 game plan. You have all your tickets in advance, and need to worry about nothing else for the remainder of the season. Just expect to get hit with some heafty fees as well; both service charges and a nice, big delivery charge. In total I ended up paying about $315 for 14 games (I bought mine about a week before the season opened so opening week was not included. More on this below), or about $23 a ticket. Now, that might not seem so bad until you consider that quite a few of my tickets have a face value of $11 and $15, and the most expensive of my tickets go FOR $23. Basically I’m left paying the “Gold” level pricing for all 14 of my games (only eight are actually “Gold” games) and in some cases that means I paid more than twice the face value of the ticket.
So how to avoid this? Simple, you do it the old fashioned way: buy your tickets at the door. When you purchase your tickets at Citi Field, there are no extra fees and no order charges (service charges apply over the phone as well). $15 means $15 and $30 means $30. You buy your tickets, no questions asked, enjoy your game. Most games do not sell out, and there are almost always plenty of seats in the Promenade levels. The only thing planning ahead is going to get you is extra charges on your credit card.
2. A better seat selection. This has happened to both myself and friends of mine before we started to wise up to what was going on. A couple of week before a game we’d want to go to, we’d log on, and search for some $15 tickets. After a search, we’d be told there were no seats available in that price point, and the cheapest seats left were much more expensive than what we were looking for, usually two to four times the price, if not more. Hey, its a new stadium and a new season, so you suck it up and dish out a little more cash than what you wanted. Then you go to the game, and from your $60 Ceasar’s Club seats you notice a lot of empty seats up in the promenade.
Or a friend of mine, who called me to tell me he wanted to go to a Mets game in about two weeks. Naturally, I told him tickets were going fast, and he should plan ahead. He didn’t want to spend more than $30, but when I looked online, the cheapest seats were $60 Ceasers Club seats. I told him he might be better off going to a different game. Well, lucky for him he didn’t take my advice, and just showed up at the game the day of and went to the box office. He got $28 Promenade Box seats. So what gives?
Well the Mets are trying to decieve you into buying more expensive tickets, at least not intentionally. What’s going on is that the Mets reserve quite a few seats for their season ticket and partial season ticket plans, which they continue to try to sell into the season (and are still selling as of today). This is especially true up in the Promenade levels, where many of the seats continue to be held for all of the 15 game plans. Here’s the catch: about a week before that paticular week’s games start, the Mets will free up those tickets for the general public to buy, removing them from the season ticket plans (that’s why opening week wasn’t included in my package). Had you not planned ahead, and waited until a few days before your game to buy the tickets, you would have had access to seats that were a lot cheaper.
This applies to better seats within a section as well. About three weeks ago, while at a Mets-Phillies game at Citi Field, I planned ahead and purchased tickets at the box office for the May 25th game against the Nationals. I got two Left Field Reserved tickets, and even though all that was left was row 19, the very last row, I was quite proud of myself. Face value of the tickets said $30 each, and by buying my tickets at the door I paid not one penny more than that. No fees. No order chargers. No delivery charges. I was happy, that is, until I did a quick search today. Out of curiosity, I did a search for two tickets in Left Field Reserved, and now, fifth row is available, as well as sixth row, and seventh row, and so on and so forth. These were tickets held for season ticket plans, that had only be opened to the public in the last few days, well after I had planned ahead and purchased my tickets. Once again, taking the Mets advice had come back around to kick me in the behind.
Buying your tickets later, is in fact, better. The key is to take a look at the Mets ticket plan page, and wait until the game you want to go to is removed from those plans. Then, you’ll have many more options to choose from.
3. StubHub. What’s great about Stub Hub is that its not just another ticket scalping site. Its a site where Mets fans who have season tickets, and can’t make it to every game, can post up their tickets online for you to buy. You click on the section you want, the price you want, and boom, you print out your tickets at home to take with you to the game. Because they work with the Mets directly, StubHub gaurantees they’ll be legitimate, and you won’t have any problems getting in.
Sometimes people put up their tickts looking to make a profit, sometimes they just want to break even, and sometimes they only want to make back some of their money. Its the latter that makes StubHub such a great option for those who really do want to plan ahead, but want to avoid paying more than the face value of the ticket.
As of right now, StubHub has lots of great Promenade tickets available for Mets games for as little as $7. Yes, the site does charge you fees, but they actually come out to much less than Mets.com charges you. If you find tickets being sold for under face value, once the sur-charges are added in, you can find yourself paying about face value for the ticket, AND you’d have planned ahead at the same time. So you can rest easy, and not feel guilty about spending more.
Keep in mind there are things the Mets can do to fix this. Teams such as the Dodgers charge less for tickets purchased in advance, so once the fees are added in, you come out paying about the same for the ticket as you would the day of the game. Its obvious why the Mets want you to buy your tickets in advance, in paticular with the season ticket plans; you’re comitting, and paying, well ahead of the game. And for the fan it would seem the better option as well. We can relax, knowing our seating options have been reserved for us. But when the end result is that those of us who seemingly do the right thing end up paying more, and in some cases, get stuck with worse seats than our friends who show up the day of the game, the questions is, why bother?
And as fans start to catch on, the Mets are going to need to start convincing us of just that.
www.metspolice.com
@metspolice
