2007 Season, Fan Experience

Tigers leave Ticketmaster?

14 Comments

It appears that the Ticketmaster won’t be handling Detroit Tigers ticket sales this year. If you’ve purchased spring training tickets you may have noticed that the process was hosted by tickets.com and driven by an MLB account.

I’m not sure what the resulting fees will be, but the impact looks to be:

  • There’s a new phone number: 866-66-TIGER (866-668-4437)
  • Individual tickets will be available 3 ways on March 3rd at 10:00am. 1. Online at Tigers.com, 2. In person at the Tigers box office, 3. Over the phone. You will no longer be able to go to a Ticketmaster outlet.
  • Because it is a frenzy online when the tickets go on sale and you only have minutes to get your information in, you may want to create an MLB.com account ahead of time – and log in.

The fact that it requires an MLB.com account makes this feel like a MLBAM initiative and less of a team specific thing.

If the fees are less this will certainly be a positive for Tigers fans. And in doing a dry run with spring training tickets it appears the the captcha is actually legible. There is nothing like the frustration of not being able to even decipher the text you need to type in.

14 thoughts on “Tigers leave Ticketmaster?”

  1. Yeah, the dude who took my Season Ticket order the other week told me all about the change. We had lots of time to discuss it, as one of the features of the new system is that the computers are apparently VERY slow. Yikes.

  2. I ordered some tickets last weekend to the Tigers-Twins game at the TwinkieDome in May. They used the same process, as I had to register an account with MLB.com. I paid $4 per ticket in service charges, as 4 $29 tickets cost $132.00 total. I’ve never really been a big fan of Ticketmaster…so I don’t mind the switch.

  3. Looks like tickets.com. Its much better than ticketmaster for popular tickets like for the playoffs (or Cubs tickets last year). They dump people into a “virtual waiting room,” and the computers won’t melt while you’re in the last stage of buying. Fees are probably about the same.

  6. Last year when I showed up Saturday morning at the box office to get tickets, 400 people already had wristbands and were able to cut in line at 9AM. Does anyone know if this will be the case again this year??? I guess the Tigers were handing out wristbands the night before.

  7. I have season tickets for the first time. 27 game package. I have NO idea what advantages this gets me in terms of buying single day tickets. Do we get to purchase them early or something? I have folks coming in from out of town (Iowa and Mass) who’d like to join me for the day, and being able to order tix early would really help!

  8. One thing I noticed right away when getting spring training tix is the system is much more friendly when buying multiple games. You don’t have to go thru ‘check out’ a bunch of times and go back to the main schedule page, it asks you if you want to keep shopping and holds the tix while you pick tix for other games.

  9. Do we get to purchase them early or something?

    No, you have to wait until I’m done picking out all of mine. 😉
    I don’t believe they are available early. They don’t want to start selling individual games until they’re sure they milked the season tickets for all they’re worth. Perfectly understandable, of course.

    In the past, we’ve had one advantage though. We don’t have to go through the standard ticketing system. We can just call our sales rep and he’ll sell us individual tickets without a processing fee. I’m not completely sure this is still possible, but I imagine it is.

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