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Before I start – this is from Todd Kelman (MD of the Devils) not from Kris Agland, I just don’t have an inferno account and this is the only account I must have ever logged into from this computer. So apologies to Kris if he still uses this. I will set up my own account in the future.
Just want to clear a few things up relating to the complaints I have read all day on social media from people who booked playoff tickets.
£5 BOOKING FEE – 100% my call. Staff thought it was too high, said it should be £3 or £3.50 to cover the costs we incur through our payment provider for card bookings. But I think our payment provider for card bookings charges us around 2.5% so for an adult ticket that would be about £2.20. We charged £5 fee per ticket for Adult & Concession tickets, and £2.50 for each ticket in a family weekend pass (4 tickets x £2.50 = £10). So yes, after the fee from our payment provider is covered, we are “pocketing” about £2.80 per Adult & Concession ticket and about £3 in total for a family ticket (£3 / 4 tickets = 75p per seat). It is my fault we didn’t update the website story with the added booking fee, and for that I apologise.
WHY WE DO IT OURSELVES – So 5 years ago I listened to loads of fans telling me how hard it was to get through on that Monday to the Nottingham box office, I heard stories of people sitting on the phone and incurring charges to wait and wait up to 60 minutes to get through. I heard stories of people getting to the final stage of booking online only to be bumped off the system and having to start all over again. People begged me to do something about it. I asked about it for 3 years at board meetings to sell our own tickets, last year they finally let us. So we do it ourselves because we want our fans to be able to book in advance, and to pick the seats they want.
WHY WE HAVE PEOPLE QUEUE UP – I am aware that it is 2020 and there should be a better system than having people line up and do it in person, but this is a fair process and everyone has the same chance to come down and line up. We cannot do it ourselves online, if we were to do it online, we would just keep it with the Box Office in Nottingham.
WHY IS IT SUCH A “CLUSTER FUCK?” – I was there this morning selling the tickets, it was as calm as I have ever seen people in an ice rink. The whole process from the time we started selling took just over 2 hrs to sell 800 tickets. The process was smooth and easy once we opened the office doors and started selling. Maybe people that lined up at 5am thought the period of 5:00am to 8:00am was a clusterfuck but I highly doubt it. My experience with Devils fans is they look after their own and self-police so I am sure people jumping the queue or annoying fellow fans was probably very minimal. If the clusterfuck you refer to was having to fill out a form with the type of tickets you wanted and your name was too confusing, I really can’t make that much simpler. And if you filled out the exact seat you wanted to book, the reason why that couldn’t work is because you couldn’t possibly know what seats are booked ahead of you. And for the record, I have seen my fair share of clusterfucks and this was as far from a clusterfuck as clusterfucks can be.
I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST FEW IN THE LINE, WHY WERE THERE TICKETS BOOKED ALREADY? Because we contacted all our volunteers and sponsors and as a courtesy offered to let them book in advance. The volunteers are the people that we rely on to work for us all season and I believe the corporate sponsors deserve the perk for putting in the money they do. Between the sponsors and the volunteers, this was probably a total of 60 tickets pre-booked before 8:00am on Saturday out of over 800 tickets. We didn’t let them book the best seats, we kept the seats we assumed would be the most popular with fans available to the people in line. So even if they had the seats you wanted, there was the row in front or behind that was probably open when we started.
THE PROCESS – I asked 3 other staff members besides me to give up their Saturday morning, get in by 7:00am and stay until 12noon to get this all done. We will also probably take a full day in the office for 2 of them to allocate all the tickets correctly into envelopes and label them for you so you get your correct weekend tickets. All part of the service that you are paying for.
QUESTIONING THE ORGANISATION – I am certain that the £5 booking fee is what has gotten under everyone’s skin. But of the 800 tickets we sold today, only one person who bought 2 tickets spoke to me about it. He wasn’t upset, he just asked why we didn’t let him know beforehand. I apologised and that was that. Nobody from the Devils said “if you don’t like it, don’t buy your tickets” or anything along those lines. In fact, the most vocal people on social media couldn’t have been nicer about it to me in person, seriously. I am not going to name names but you thanked me for doing this, you were gracious and polite to me and the whole staff, but then took to twitter to bitch about everything. Now, I am a big believer in social media keeping brands and businesses honest, but we aren’t exactly Nike, you know us by our first names and you had your chance in person. Always feel free to speak to me in person when you have the chance rather than bitch about the organisation on social media. I think social media is great for some stuff but you can quickly create a shitstorm (good word – almost as good as clusterfuck) by getting people that didn’t buy tickets, that weren’t involved in the day, riled up about the club for no other reason than to air your grievances that you could have done to me in person. Wouldn’t it have felt way better to be able to tell me in person? Maybe we could have explained it and you would have gone away happier with the process.
I don’t like playing this card anymore, but do you really think we are trying to screw over our own fans? We try our best to always put our fans first. I think we have proven that often over the last 6 years. Believe me, It would be way easier for us not to get involved in selling playoff tickets, but we listened to you when you were complaining about the process going through the Nottingham Arena box office in years past. So we decided to do something about it. I know not everyone likes the process, but we are all ears if you have a better way to do it. It’s easy to complain about it, harder to come up with a viable solution that is cost effective and realistic.
So feel free to grab me tomorrow to tell me how you feel let down by the club over the booking fee or the queueing or the clusterfuck of the day and I will explain my reasoning on everything and I will listen to your ideas and see if it will be better next season.
And the reasoning this is on the inferno instead of social media is because:
Thanks for reading and see you at the games…
Todd Kelman
Just want to clear a few things up relating to the complaints I have read all day on social media from people who booked playoff tickets.
£5 BOOKING FEE – 100% my call. Staff thought it was too high, said it should be £3 or £3.50 to cover the costs we incur through our payment provider for card bookings. But I think our payment provider for card bookings charges us around 2.5% so for an adult ticket that would be about £2.20. We charged £5 fee per ticket for Adult & Concession tickets, and £2.50 for each ticket in a family weekend pass (4 tickets x £2.50 = £10). So yes, after the fee from our payment provider is covered, we are “pocketing” about £2.80 per Adult & Concession ticket and about £3 in total for a family ticket (£3 / 4 tickets = 75p per seat). It is my fault we didn’t update the website story with the added booking fee, and for that I apologise.
WHY WE DO IT OURSELVES – So 5 years ago I listened to loads of fans telling me how hard it was to get through on that Monday to the Nottingham box office, I heard stories of people sitting on the phone and incurring charges to wait and wait up to 60 minutes to get through. I heard stories of people getting to the final stage of booking online only to be bumped off the system and having to start all over again. People begged me to do something about it. I asked about it for 3 years at board meetings to sell our own tickets, last year they finally let us. So we do it ourselves because we want our fans to be able to book in advance, and to pick the seats they want.
WHY WE HAVE PEOPLE QUEUE UP – I am aware that it is 2020 and there should be a better system than having people line up and do it in person, but this is a fair process and everyone has the same chance to come down and line up. We cannot do it ourselves online, if we were to do it online, we would just keep it with the Box Office in Nottingham.
WHY IS IT SUCH A “CLUSTER FUCK?” – I was there this morning selling the tickets, it was as calm as I have ever seen people in an ice rink. The whole process from the time we started selling took just over 2 hrs to sell 800 tickets. The process was smooth and easy once we opened the office doors and started selling. Maybe people that lined up at 5am thought the period of 5:00am to 8:00am was a clusterfuck but I highly doubt it. My experience with Devils fans is they look after their own and self-police so I am sure people jumping the queue or annoying fellow fans was probably very minimal. If the clusterfuck you refer to was having to fill out a form with the type of tickets you wanted and your name was too confusing, I really can’t make that much simpler. And if you filled out the exact seat you wanted to book, the reason why that couldn’t work is because you couldn’t possibly know what seats are booked ahead of you. And for the record, I have seen my fair share of clusterfucks and this was as far from a clusterfuck as clusterfucks can be.
I WAS ONE OF THE FIRST FEW IN THE LINE, WHY WERE THERE TICKETS BOOKED ALREADY? Because we contacted all our volunteers and sponsors and as a courtesy offered to let them book in advance. The volunteers are the people that we rely on to work for us all season and I believe the corporate sponsors deserve the perk for putting in the money they do. Between the sponsors and the volunteers, this was probably a total of 60 tickets pre-booked before 8:00am on Saturday out of over 800 tickets. We didn’t let them book the best seats, we kept the seats we assumed would be the most popular with fans available to the people in line. So even if they had the seats you wanted, there was the row in front or behind that was probably open when we started.
THE PROCESS – I asked 3 other staff members besides me to give up their Saturday morning, get in by 7:00am and stay until 12noon to get this all done. We will also probably take a full day in the office for 2 of them to allocate all the tickets correctly into envelopes and label them for you so you get your correct weekend tickets. All part of the service that you are paying for.
QUESTIONING THE ORGANISATION – I am certain that the £5 booking fee is what has gotten under everyone’s skin. But of the 800 tickets we sold today, only one person who bought 2 tickets spoke to me about it. He wasn’t upset, he just asked why we didn’t let him know beforehand. I apologised and that was that. Nobody from the Devils said “if you don’t like it, don’t buy your tickets” or anything along those lines. In fact, the most vocal people on social media couldn’t have been nicer about it to me in person, seriously. I am not going to name names but you thanked me for doing this, you were gracious and polite to me and the whole staff, but then took to twitter to bitch about everything. Now, I am a big believer in social media keeping brands and businesses honest, but we aren’t exactly Nike, you know us by our first names and you had your chance in person. Always feel free to speak to me in person when you have the chance rather than bitch about the organisation on social media. I think social media is great for some stuff but you can quickly create a shitstorm (good word – almost as good as clusterfuck) by getting people that didn’t buy tickets, that weren’t involved in the day, riled up about the club for no other reason than to air your grievances that you could have done to me in person. Wouldn’t it have felt way better to be able to tell me in person? Maybe we could have explained it and you would have gone away happier with the process.
I don’t like playing this card anymore, but do you really think we are trying to screw over our own fans? We try our best to always put our fans first. I think we have proven that often over the last 6 years. Believe me, It would be way easier for us not to get involved in selling playoff tickets, but we listened to you when you were complaining about the process going through the Nottingham Arena box office in years past. So we decided to do something about it. I know not everyone likes the process, but we are all ears if you have a better way to do it. It’s easy to complain about it, harder to come up with a viable solution that is cost effective and realistic.
So feel free to grab me tomorrow to tell me how you feel let down by the club over the booking fee or the queueing or the clusterfuck of the day and I will explain my reasoning on everything and I will listen to your ideas and see if it will be better next season.
And the reasoning this is on the inferno instead of social media is because:
- it is far too long to go on twitter;
- I can’t use the word clusterfuck as much as I felt I needed to;
- I hope that someone will tweet out that I posted all of this on the inferno.
Thanks for reading and see you at the games…
Todd Kelman
