Single Ticket Price

[Darin Steffl]

Does anyone offer one ticket price instead of child/adult/senior categories? I'm considering moving to one price to simplify things for staff and customers. No more asking "are you a senior?" or "how old is the little one?"

I imagine some people might miss their discount for child/senior pricing but we may do Value Tuesday pricing and recommend coming that day for the best pricing regardless of age.

[James Wyrembelski]

Yes, we do that here.

I used to have Adult/Child/Matinee pricing. I switched to one single ticket price of 7.00 back in March of 22 in order to raise ticket prices a touch and keep things simple. Our regular adult price was 7.00 and the child/matinees were 5.00.

I remember being worried that people would be upset about the loss of a discount but never heard one single person complain or comment. To be honest, I'm not sure most even noticed outside of a few regular matinee people.

[Frank Cox]

I used to do Adult and Child/Senior (same price) but some people got mad if I asked them if they were a senior and some people got mad if I gave them a senior ticket even if they were obviously old people () so I got rid of Senior price and just do 12-and-under and everybody else.

Now I just say, "How many twelve and under?" when someone comes in with kids. Haven't had any issues with that so far.

[Lyle Romer]

Single price also eliminates a method of employee theft. Long ago when I was an assistant manager for General Cinema (which shows how long ago it was) we used to have some box office employees who would charge adults the full price but issue senior tickets. They'd keep track of how many they did and then pocket the difference.

To catch them we'd have surprise times where a manager would take tickets and then we'd ask how much a person paid if an adult that didn't look like a senior handed over a senior ticket and ask which window they purchased from. Those employees would find that they became relegated to working as an usher or stopped getting hours depending on if they admitted it or not.

[Frank Cox]

There's a little discussion of bargain nights here, too:

http://www.film-tech.com/vbb/forum/g...e-pass-is-back

[Mike Blakesley]

We have 4 ticket categories: Adult, Senior, Child and Pre-school. We get far more adults (over 12) than kids to the movies, so if we went to one price it would have to amount to a huge price increase for the kids, if we wanted to keep our grosses the same or a bit higher. Personally I don't care about the math, since the computer does that -- and you have to greet people as they come in anyway, so asking how old the kids are is no big deal.

Seniors are kid of a challenge. We get a lot of seniors, and it seems like they're never happy. The discount isn't enough, the age limit (65 for us) is too high, they don't like picking out reserved seats, they can't find their seats, the movie is too long, they arrive late and then can't see when they get inside, etc. Some of them proudly say "two seniors!" when they walk in, others get mad if we ask them, some don't say anything and then get mad if we take for granted that they're not seniors, etc. I've thought about putting up a sign saying "Please let us know if you are a senior over 65, so we can give you your discount" but all that would do is lead to every single person coming in and declaring they're a senior to be funny. Probably should get rid of the category altogether. I know my wife (who sells tickets usually) would love it.

[Darin Steffl]

I think the goal here is to find the average ticket price when looking at annual grosses. Add up all the ticket revenue then divide by number of tickets sold then that's your average ticket price. The single ticket price should be close to that.

Has anyone done that math before? If not, I'm curious what your numbers are? I'll go through mine and see what we're at shortly.

[Martin McCaffery]

that would do is lead to every single person coming in and declaring they're a senior to be funny. Probably should get rid of the category altogether

Which is worse, younger people declaring themselves Seniors (giggle, giggle) or those that ask for "Two Children" and think that is the funniest ,most original witticism ever spoken aloud?

[Darin Steffl]

We see plenty of parents and kids trying to act like they're under 12 to get the discount. One price would fix this and not make it awkward.

My main goal for this is to remove the awkwardness of asking age. It's not something we want to do and not something we want our customers to lie about and we can tell they're lying. It's just weird all around.

[Darin Steffl]

Ok so our average ticket price in 2021 was $6.80 and in 2022, it was $7.07

This is with $6 child/senior tickets and $9 adult tickets.

Being that we're remodeling our Theatre and adding heated recliners, I'd say an $8 single ticket price is more than fair when we reopen. We were considering $8 or $9 but I don't want to push people away with ticket price by going $10 or higher when we can make up for it in concessions. So it seems if we stay $9 or less, we are in a good spot with the new amenities we offer. We're also adding a free, small arcade. For those want even cheaper, we can do Value Tuesday and offer $5 or $6 tickets like our competition does.

Multiplex theaters about 15 miles away have standard pricing as follows:

Normal screen: $12.43 for adults, $9.19 for child/senior
PLF: $15.68 adult, $12.43 child/senior
IMAX: $16.22 adult, $12.98 child/senior

[Jim Cassedy]

OneTicketPlz.jpg
(a good cartoon deserves a re-post)

[Mike Blakesley]

Which is worse, younger people declaring themselves Seniors (giggle, giggle) or those that ask for "Two Children" and think that is the funniest ,most original witticism ever spoken aloud?

It is pretty funny, they think they are the first person ever to make that joke. We get it maybe 2 or 3 times a day!

What's really funny is, our cutoff for the adults is 12, so I had some dad come in a few weeks ago with a kid and he said "Two adults and one child" and I said "How old is the child?" and he said "Eleven" and the kid piped up "No, Dad, I'm 12!" Always wondered if Dad was trying to pull a fast one or if he just forgot.... Dads will do that.

When it comes to getting the kids' ages, I sometimes like to ask the kids, themselves. "How old are you, buddy?" Kids love to tell how old they are, for some odd reason.

I guess we'll stick with what has worked.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Most cinemas around here don't even have a traditional ticket booth and only allow you to buy a ticket on-line or at a ticket vending machine. I'd say it's pretty easy to cheat this way, especially if it's busy in front of the ticket check point. While the terminals they use to scan the tickets will show the kind of ticket, I've never ever seen someone being asked if he/she qualifies for the discount given.

[Mike Blakesley]

I thought about that, actually, when we started doing reserved seats. A person could easily buy five "child" tickets for a group of five adults. We decided it would be a good idea to verify those tickets in those situations. It is a major "flaw" in RTS that it does not display the ticket types on screen when a customer's barcode is scanned; so we look at the printed tickets to verify this isn't happening. I think people know we are checking, because we haven't ever caught anybody doing that yet.