Tickets for the 3rd stop of the 2019 Pro Swim Series in Richmond, Virginia and Bloomington, Indiana are on sale now, and prices for the Richmond stop
An all-sessions pass in Richmond is listed at $149 (with no discounts for children). That meet will be held from April 10th-13th. The 4th stop in Bloomington, meanwhile, is selling all-session passes for just $60 for adults and $45 for children. That stop runs from May 17th-19th (only 3 days, versus the 4 days that all of the other stops will be).
In Knoxville to open the series, premium all-session passes were $85, which was on-par with last year’s opener in Austin. Austin was the most expensive stop in the 2018 series, however, with most meets having all-sessions passes for $60-or-less (see comparison table here).
The meet in Richmond will be hosted at the Collegiate School Aquatics Center. The 50-meter pool was the one used for the 2008 US Olympic Trials in Omaha, Nebraska.
Individual session and all-session tickets for Richmond and Bloomington are available here.
Somebody in Richmond obviously failed their Marketing 101 class, cause they have no idea how to set a price point.
Alternatively, they’ve figured out that they can make more revenue from by charging their ‘captive audience’ (parents) twice as much for a ticket than they can by selling an extra 50-100 tickets at half the price.
They’re probably right.
If you have a captive audience, why stop at $150, why not $300 or $500. At some point, the parents will just drop their swimmer off and sit in the grocery store parking lot around the corner from Swim RVA pool and pull up the free webstream and save themselves the ridiculous ticket fee.
Richmond’s price point just reinforces the elite country club image of swimming when it should be marketing the sport to young children from across the economic spectrum.
I think you answered your own question. They believe parents will pay $150, they don’t believe that parents will pay $300.
What they ‘should’ be doing is trying to make their money back on a meet. It seems like everyone’s idea of ‘how to market this sport’ is to give it away for free, or very cheap. If more people spent their time trying to make money (better meet format?) then I think the sport would be in a much better place. How many children are going to come to this meet at any price point that it’s going to appreciably change the future of the sport? The grandstand only seats 700.
Your argument sounds a lot like cognitive… Read more »
Unless you are a parent who would pay $30 for the Wednesday evening 800 only session?
Hi are you Swim at ymca
The good news, parking won’t be an issues at the pool.
The bad? What to guess the price of a slice of pizza?
Yes, that means that my daughter and I will not go even though we live 90 minutes away–we were hoping to take in a final/prelim/final one of the weekend days like we did in Indy last year. That trip was much less expensive (aside from the flights). I’ll be interested to see how full the stands are.
GRAP, the host facility in Richmond, has a history of overpricing for facility usage and event hosting. Hope that isn’t the case here, as $150 tickets won’t put fans in the seats!
Do the athletes receive a portion of the ticket sales?
This is not good for spectators! That is expensive and most likely be empty stands.