Price cut gets tickets moving for Winnipeg ‘home’ game

After shockingly few people had purchased tickets to next week’s Raiders “home game” in Winnipeg, there’s finally been a rash of sales for the preseason game against the Packers.

And we sense it had nothing to do with both the Raiders and Green Bay notching impressive victories in their openers last week. More likely it’s because the promoter slashed prices in half for many seats for the game at IG Field, according to CBC.ca.

The exorbitant prices — some prime seats cost nearly $450 after taxes — were mostly to blame for just about 8,900 tickets being sold at the 33,000-seat stadium for the Aug. 22 game in Canada. So, On Ice Entertainment Ltd. of Canada, teaming with sponsor Molson Coors, reduced up to 6,000 lower-bowl seat prices in the end zones from $164 to $75 on Friday.

Suddenly, about half of the 33,000 seats have been sold, which will at least improve the optics for the Week 3 preseason game when some feared seeing a near-empty stadium.

“What we wanted to do was create an area that we needed to address,” said On Ice Entertainment president John Graham. “Everybody was saying about tickets (being priced too high) and we found a partner that was willing to step in and assist us. So if somebody turns around and says, ‘I’d like to go to the game,’ there’s an extremely affordable ticket.”

Before the price reduction, the cheapest remaining tickets were going for almost $200, which seems an insane amount to ask when tickets for Vikings home preseason games — the closest NFL team to Manitoba — cost as little as $12 on the secondary market, CBC reported.

Many of the first seats sold for the Raiders game were the limited number of the leastexpensive tickets ($75). Seems that’s the magic price point in Winnipeg, where there are still many seats costing up to $266, for which there may be no takers.

“For sure we’d like to see more ticket sales, and I’m sure that Mercedes would like to sell more cars,” Graham said.