Entertainment: Discount ticket business up 35 %
Once in a while, the background in a press release is more interesting than the main news being promoted.
Such is the case with today’s Business Wire release about Tix4Tonight, the ticket company a lot of us believe is the cart that pulls the horse when it comes to inflated ticket prices on theStrip.
Las Vegas has always been a secretive town when it comes to attendance counts and show grosses. But Tix Corporation is on Nasdaq, so the release blows the company’s horn to say it sells about 115,000 discount show tickets every month.
And that it saw 35 percent sales increase in the second quarter.
Tix4Tonight has become the main engine for the vast majority of Las Vegas shows that fall beyond the few “must sees” (The likes of Cher or “Love” that still sell a majority of seats at face value, or at least in packages where a room or dinner are the more obviously elastic part of the combo.)
The press release touts the opening of the seventh Tix4Tonight outlet in as many years, with the new one in the dumpy but center-Strip Casino Royale.
That’s just a stone’s throw from the Imperial Palace, where “Matsuri” makes a fine example. The afternoon show has a face value ticket of $62 — perhaps to collect the more reasonable price of about $35 (half-price, plus service charge) at this new, convenient discount location.
The company might dispute the “mark ’em up to mark ’em down” theory. But at least we now have some numbers about the impact of Tix4Tonight in its seven years in town.
The release also says:
“In recently announced second-quarter results, the company’s Tix4Tonight business segment increased the number of discount show tickets sold in the second quarter by 35 percent to 341,000 tickets. The gross sales value of discount show tickets sold, commissions and fees earned on the sale of discount tickets to customers increased 53 percent, to $19.5 million, and revenue grew 47 percent to $4.1 million during the quarter. Tix Corporation expects continued revenue growth and improved profitability for the second half of the year.”
That’s a lot of tickets. But context? That’s the hard part. As we mentioned, actual sales are a tough nut to crack so we can really only talk about capacity.
In April 2007, I did a column that tried to come up with some broad estimates about ticket inventory. Back then, before Cirque du Soleil opened “Believe,” I wrote that the other five Cirques (86,600) plus Blue Man Group (17,600) alone added up to 104,200 tickets on sale each week.
I averaged enough of the other shows to make sure I could push the weekly inventory past 200,000 tickets per week as an extremely conservative estimate. With the little shows, you can get into a whole debate about actual capacity versus realistic expections for sales. (For example, the Riviera’s old showroom probably packed in 600 or more people in the good old days. But magician Scarlett now would be delighted to sell 200 each night).
But if you indulge me on 200,000 per week, simple math would have Tix selling about 14 percent of inventory if they’re selling about 28,700 per week.
I’m betting the percentage of actual sales is way higher, especially for the smaller shows that depend on them more.
