WP: Redskins Fans Waited While Brokers Got Tickets

[The Burgundy Ghost]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...9/01/AR2009090103984.html?sid=ST2009090104025

A very interesting read for me. Being a ticket holder who was not very happy about not getting upgraded this year despite paying early and a lower demand/renewal rate.

from the article:

Thousands of general admission tickets were sold to brokers, who resold them on the secondary market, often at higher-than-retail prices, according to interviews and internal Redskin documents. These were often tickets to the very seats that Redskins fans have waited years to get.

The Redskins acknowledged that the sales were made but said they were against team policy.

Redskins General Counsel David Donovan said the prohibited sales were discovered in the spring during an internal audit of last season's ticket contracts and involved about 15 ticket brokering companies. He said the ticket sales employees involved were disciplined.

 

[Sarge]

Looks like a buttload of people/companies are backing out of season ticket contracts as well. Wonder why danny doesn't let them out of their contract and resell the tickets to some Dallas fans or something

 

[Blondie]

Surely with the number of opposing fans that are always in attendance, this didnt come as a surprise to anyone.

 

[Yusuf06]

So to sum up, Dan Snyder pursues yet another short-term strategy to increase profit that hoses the fans and causes hard feelings and negative PR. Truly, truly shocking....haven't seen that before.

This story along with the one about the team suing fans over not being able to pay for their premium seats only further shows Snyder and Co.'s incompetence. Any business owner with half a brain could figure out that the return on suing people in financial difficulty would be incredibly low. The low level of collections along with the negative press and bad feelings from customers ultimately makes it really poor business decision.

But then again, given his "success" with Johnny Rockets, DC sports radio, Six Flags etc. should it really be a surprise? I think these incredibly poor business decisions finally confirm my prior hunch that Snyder is not in fact the business genius he's been portrayed as. Rather, he was just incredibly fortunate in hitting the M & A frenzy and cashing out at just the right time.

 

[Mark The Homer]

For years I've been looking at these tickets -

18 tickets together here: http://www.stubhub.com/washington-redskins-tickets/?ticket_id=201066058

14 tickets together here: http://www.stubhub.com/washington-redskins-tickets/?ticket_id=202570434

From the seller comments, it looks to me like the same individual typed out both descriptions (use of lower-case but capitalizing each word).