Wednesday, November 20, 2024
TKTS to Open Booth in Philadelphia, Hoping to Boost Local Theaters
The New York Times: TKTS, the landmark theater discounter that has been a Times Square mainstay for 51 years, is expanding to Philadelphia at a time when regional theaters are struggling and ticket costs are a persistent cause of consumer concern.
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3 comments:
This is, in my mind, a huge step for theaters around the country. If this trial program works and the combination of the TKTS name and the discounted tickets do end up bringing more audience members and revenue to theaters in the area, this could be a solution to problems that theaters around the country have been facing for years. Audiences and potential audiences have already been attempting to make it known that one of the biggest barriers to seeing theater is the high ticket prices. However, it feels like every time this concern is raised, theaters either fail to make a change or implement programs that lower costs but either only temporarily or in ways that are hard to access for the majority of people. The TKTS booth however is a way of offering these lower tickets that makes these discounted tickets both easily accessible and well publicized while also allowing for theaters to sell tickets at their normal prices without drawing from that same pool of potential customers. I hope that this system works out and it helps to bring audiences and revenue into the theaters of Philadelphia.
I love the TKTS booth in NYC. Whenever I go to New York it’s always one of the first places I stop to see if I can get a Broadway or off-Broadway show ticket for cheaper than the box office sells them for. It’s exciting to see that they will be opening one in Philadelphia for the local theatres in the area. I can only imagine how this will increase revenue for those theatre’s as well as bring in more patrons. Currently, even in Pittsburgh when I go to see shows it’s nice to always get the student discount, because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to afford going to see as many shows as I do downtown. I think the overall population will look to go see more shows with this TKTS booth's new location. It might also change the dialogue outside the theatre industry that it’s too expensive to go see theatre and so it might bring in new patrons who have never been able to see live performances before. All in all this is a huge step forward for the theatre industry and an opportunity for local theatres to earn revenue in a new way.
As a theater lover, my first stop when I go to London or New York must be TKTS! I will arrange other itineraries for the day only after I buy discounted tickets from TKTS on that day. I think TKTS is a good supplement for the ticket market with huge daily passenger flow like Broadway. And it is also worth learning from other commercial organizations. For a theater, the most important thing is to sell as many tickets as possible. So I found that most plays are sold on different ticketing platforms. But this method may cause the ticketing platform to take too much commission. If it is only sold on a single website, it will actually limit the audience's ticket purchasing channels. So if there is a platform like TKTS that integrates tickets for many popular plays and only meets the needs of watching plays on that day, it can actually consume a lot of surplus tickets in a targeted manner.
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