The VIP Treatment

This guy asks “What would VIP service in Economy Class Look Like?” His premise was interesting:

• Segment your audience via optional fees, so that people can pay for the services they want
• But still treat everyone great, no matter what they’ve paid you

I think we could be doing a better job of this in the theatre. Don’t get my wrong: customers are already paying plenty of fees on top of the price of the ticket. But they’re for boring (and un-motivating) things like building maintenance or ticket-handling.

So what are the “value-added services” audiences might be willing to pay for?

Parking

Right now, we either leave patrons on their own to find parking, or bury the “cost” of parking in with a subscription package. Tom Vanderbilt spoke at Yale yesterday about traffic-related policy, and had some interesting things to say: price parking spots such that 15% are always empty. We’ve talked a lot about queuing theory in class, where excess capacity in the system reduces wait times. But it’s never occurred to me to manage our severe New Haven parking shortage in this way.

Line Jumping

There are times I just know I’m going to be cutting it awfully close to curtain before i can pick up my tickets at the Box Office. Other times, I abhor wasting my time in lines. In both cases, I would be willing to pay a little something extra to be able to jump the line and know that I can show up with only moments to spare and still breeze into the theatre. There is some definite room for experimentation here about how the offer is presented to consumers (5% of ticket price? $2? $20 for the year?), and what makes economical sense for the theatre (# patrons x $fee > %$ box office salary). Utilizing the queuing theory from above is key to this one too. Don’t forget those bar lines at intermission too.

Checking Bags/Coats

This isn’t a brilliantly new idea, but when’s the last time you experimented with how much you were charging for coat/bag check? We stopped offering this as a service years ago, but I’m wondering if with a little re-thinking, we could figure out how to price this option for the folks that actually want it. Maybe it’s just because my purse is enormous and carries the equivalent of an electronics store and half of a library inside, but I’d be happy to pay $3 and know that I have the space under my seat for my legs.

Upgrading Seats

When I check in at the airport, I am invariably offered to upgrade my seat. The last time I flew, I chose to lay down the extra $50 for an “Economy Plus” seat on Virgin America. It included all the free food, drinks (of the alcoholic sort even!), and premium movies I wanted. 5 hours later, I was a believer. The next time I show up to a theatre where I paid for the cheap seats in the back, I’d like to be able to have the option to pay to move forward. I know I could be sneaky, and wait till lights out, and the ushers have left the room, but I like to be all settled in when the curtain rises.

While we’re at it, why hasn’t anyone expanded the legroom in the first few aisles of the theatre? Or wherever you’ve chosen to place your “first-class” seating.

Re-thinking General Admission

I get it, printing tickets for every seat in your (usually small) theatre is too much of a headache. You use those little retro “Admit One” tickets and can’t tie an individual to a seat. You don’t have a ticketing database, you have a sign up sheet with a guy at a table outside your front door. So riddle me this: why not sell 2 different tickets at 2 different prices. One’s colored green, costs $5 more, and the holder get to walk in to the theatre 10 minutes before everybody else. Even if only 5 people in your audience of 50 takes you up on the offer, it’s cost you virtually nothing.

Re-vamping Loyalty Programs

We all know the trend: subscriptions are down, single tickets (as a % of total anyway) are rising. So what if you could reward your “loyal” single ticket buyers via airline-mile like points? These would carry across any kind of purchases I make at your theatre — merchandise, concessions, tickets, etc — and across years. I could redeem these points for small things, like a drink during intermission, or big things, like a free ticket to bring a friend. Incentivize the actions you want your consumers to take.

There are some pretty cool, new ticketing programs on the horizon. But this goes beyond just changing prices, and instead changes the way we think about pricing for what we offer. Maybe we should unbundle all those services we offer to subscribers. Maybe we should make those same services available to single ticket buyers, for the right price. Maybe we should invent new services that patrons are waiting for the opportunity to pay for. Maybe we should stop offering services that are losing us money.

And then there are the free things, like actual, genuine smiles.

Ushers are usually the very first people I see at your theatre. On a performancy-by-performance basis, they’re the folks I interact with the most. They’re also probably your least trained staff/volunteers. More often than not, they can’t actually help me find my seat because they don’t know where it is. Or they totally ignore me. In the world of retail, there are clear “winners” in the customer service brand reputation: companies like Zappos and Trader Joe’s who put the customer experience at the center of what they do. We expect our patrons to sit patiently through a lot of great, but sometimes not so great, theatre. Shouldn’t they be able to expect more from us?

So which theatres are doing cool things along these ideas?