Not all fans on board as 49ers go paperless
Solomon Burke’s voice rose and his cadence quickened as he described his cherished ticket stub from a San Francisco 49ers game five years ago. Linebacker NaVorro Bowman rumbled 89 yards with an intercepted pass to seal a win in the last game ever played at Candlestick Park.
“I look at it, and all those memories come back,” said Burke, 43, a season ticket holder who lives in New Orleans. “It was my birthday, it was a Monday night game, the (Atlanta) Falcons were about to celebrate in front of us. That was one of the best games I’ve ever been to. That ticket means everything to me.”
So Burke lamented news that future fans won’t have such keepsakes. Last week, the 49ers notified fans that they are eliminating the last vestige of paper tickets for the upcoming season. It’s a move that has echoes across the sports world, as teams move to save money,
ride the digital wave and increase their control over resold tickets.
“It behooves us to know where (a) ticket is going for security purposes,” said Jamie Brandt, the 49ers’ vice president of sales and service. “We can track who should have the ticket.”
Season ticket holders will receive one wearable credential per seat that’s good for the entire season, while fans who buy seats through secondary market sellers Ticketmaster, StubHub and SeatGeek must use a mobile app that displays an electronic ticket bar code.
The 49ers stopped issuing printed tickets in 2015, their second season at Santa Clara’s Levi’s Stadium, with the goal of moving more fans to mobile ticketing. But fans could still print a PDF version of the tickets on paper.
Now the team is eliminating the PDF option. Season ticket holders will receive one wearable credential per seat that’s good for the entire season, while fans who buy seats through the secondary market sellers must use a mobile app that displays an electronic ticket bar code. But Brandt said fans who don’t have a mobile device available can go to the stadium’s ticket office for a ticket.
The Niners are not alone: The NFL plans to switch to the paperless ticket system leaguewide for the 2019 season. The 49ers, Falcons, Denver Broncos and Dallas Cowboys are transitioning early.
Hockey’s San Jose Sharks stopped accepting homeprinted PDF tickets in 2016, with season ticket holders using mobile devices or a wallet-size identification card. And starting this year, baseball’s Oakland Athletics stopped issuing printed tickets to first-time season ticket buyers, with plans to eventually go all digital.
“That is the future of ticketing,” said Ashwin Puri, A’s vice president of sales and strategy. “We don’t waste paper, and if you don’t print from home, you’re saving the environment.”
Mobile ticketing is increasingly encouraged in everything from movies to airplanes. A survey from Juniper Research, a British company, showed consumers prefer buying and using tickets with a mobile app, according to Nitin Bhas, the firm’s head of research. Hockey’s Montreal Canadiens now charge more for paper tickets, he said, while Cyprus soccer team Anorthosis Famagusta FC issued fans cards with near-field communications technology instead of paper tickets.
The 49ers aren’t making the move just to save postage and printing costs, Brandt said. “It’s more of an evolution of mobile ticketing becoming the convenient way to go,” he said. “The majority of our fans use a mobile device for ticketing.”
In addition, he said, electronic tickets are not as easy to counterfeit or lose as paper tickets or PDF printouts.
Season ticket holders already manage their accounts online, including transferring tickets electronically. A few years ago, when the 49ers stopped printing tickets (though allowed printed PDFs), some fans complained they couldn’t just hand off paper tickets to charities or sell tickets to games they couldn’t attend using sites other than the NFL’s exclusive reseller, Ticketmaster.
Last fall, the NFL renewed its partnership with Ticketmaster, but it also includes StubHub, owned by San Jose’s eBay, and SeatGeek of New York as official resellers.
The competition should help fans find the best prices, according to SeatGeek spokesman Chris Leyden. “Tons of venues are already moving toward digital,” he said. “To say it’s the future seems almost silly because in many cases, it’s already the reality.”
Season ticket holders can either use mobile tickets or the credential, which they can wear around their necks like a press pass, Brandt said. The team hasn’t revealed what the credential will look like, but it will include a printed bar code for this season. In the future, the credential might use more advanced near-field communication (NFC) or other forms of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology.
“We think it’s going to be something they’d be very proud to wear,” Brandt said.
Oakland Raiders spokesman Will Kiss said he didn’t immediately know details about the team’s upcoming ticket plans. The Raiders plan to move to Las Vegas in 2020 or later.
The Sharks said paperless ticketing dramatically cuts down on fraudulent or duplicate tickets, which used to appear at every game, spokesman Jim Sparaco said.
For those who want a physical souvenir, however, the team does offer a set of commemorative printed tickets — for an extra $50 one-time fee.
The A’s gave existing season ticket holders the choice of mobile tickets, using the MLB Ballpark app, or having paper tickets mailed. About half of them chose digital.
But new season ticket buyers have only have one option — digital, which lets the team track who bought the ticket and who is supposed to have it if it is sold or transferred to make sure it’s in the right hands, Puri said.
Mobile season and singlegame tickets can still be printed out. “Our goal is not to be so rigid that it impacts our fans,” he said. “We want to embrace technology.”
Still, the A’s will go paperless sometime in the future, Puri said.
The San Francisco Giants sent the traditional book of printed tickets this year to season ticket holders, who also receive a digital version they can print from home. But the Giants also “will likely transition away from print-at-home in the coming years,” spokeswoman Staci Slaughter said.
The Golden State Warriors also eliminated printed PDF tickets this year and transitioned some fans to mobile ticketing, but continued to issue commemorative tickets to season ticket holders, spokeswoman Lisa Goodwin said. The team hasn’t decided whether to go completely digital when it moves to San Francisco’s Chase Center in 2019.
John Adrouny, who has owned 49ers season tickets for 25 years, is a little skeptical that the revised ticketing system will work seamlessly from the start because of a litany of problems that have cropped up at Levi’s Stadium since it opened. He also experienced the “horrible mess” getting into the stadium during last year’s U2 concert, using paperless tickets sold by the concert’s promoter.
But while the Belmont resident keeps a shoebox filled with ticket stubs from big games from the 1980s and 1990s, he’s not opposed to going paperless.
“Holding on to those keepsakes, I know it’s important for a lot of people,” he said. “I’d rather go and enjoy the event.”
And in the future, he said, “My kids and their kids will not even think about it.”
Solomon Burke, who became a die-hard Niners fan as a child, flies in to watch one or two games a year and sells the rest. He agreed that younger fans might not put too much stock in saving physical tickets.
But if he’s at another exciting game, “What do I do, take a screen shot of my phone?”
“I look at it, and all those memories come back. It was my birthday, it was a Monday night game, the (Atlanta) Falcons were about to celebrate in front of us. That was one of the best games I’ve ever been to. That ticket means everything to me.” Solomon Burke, 49ers fan