How much would you pay to sit atop the Green Monster?
Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, has been adding seats over the last couple of years in response to the increase in demand of tickets. The Red Sox were one of only a few teams to completely sell out every seat for every game the past three years. The most recent additions of seats include the Green Monster seats and the Right Field Roof Deck Tables.
The pricing for these seating areas are interesting. The price of a single ticket depends on who the Red Sox are playing that day. A Green Monster seat in the second or third row to see the Kansas City Royals play would cost a person $90, but the same seat to see the New York Yankees would cost that person $110.
The Red Sox started this pricing scheme for the 2004 season. The front office determines 20 "red" games before the season starts. The "red" games are more expensive and are the games that are consider to be the games fans want to see more.
Another interesting thing is these seats are not available for purchase when the other seating areas go on sale. In order to be able to purchase Green Monster seats, one must submit an inquiry to Redsox.com (one per email address). Your name will be entered in a drawing and if your name is drawn, then you will have a two hour window to purchase Green Monster seats. This drawing stops once all the tickets for every game has been sold. For 2005, this drawing lasted only eight hours before the last seat was sold for the season.
1 comment:
This seems like an interesting study in second-degree price discrimination. You can get the fans who would pay to see a KC-Boston game as well as a Yankees-Sox game without worrying about whether or not the fan who pays 110 bucks for the Yanks game would pay the same price for a lower-caliber game. Do I agree with this? Maybe not in the case of the Green Monster seats - where the demand is likely high enough to support the higher price for all games - but this type of price discrimation seems fair for other "exotic" seating patterns at Fenway, such as in the deep center field bleachers or in the highest decks, where the demand is more elastic then in the lower decks or out on the Monster.
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