Pricing a season is full of decisions: price points, seat maps, subscription discounts, access offers, on-sale dates.
But before you start changing numbers, it’s worth asking what your existing data is telling you.
Because the biggest pricing opportunities aren’t always about what you charge. They’re often about who pays what, when they buy, and what you’re teaching them to do next.
Here are five questions worth putting on the table before you price your 2027 season.
Look back over the past five years and compare your average paid price in real terms.
What does that mean? Simply put, $50 five years ago was worth more than $50 today. Inflation reduces the purchasing power of that money over time. So, if your average paid price increased from $50 to $55, that looks like a 10% increase. But if inflation increased by more than 10% over the same period, your average paid price actually fell in real terms.
You can check this yourself using the this online inflation calculator or similar tools.
Enter your average paid price from five years ago and convert it into today’s dollars. Then compare that number with what patrons actually pay today.
Has your average paid price genuinely grown, or has it simply been trying to keep up?
Loyalty deserves to be rewarded. But rewarding loyalty and systematically underpricing it aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Look at what subscribers actually pay per ticket, including discounts, and how that yield has changed over time.
Have your most loyal patrons also become the people you’ve been most reluctant to increase?
If the gap between subscriber and single-ticket yield has continued to grow, there may be room to protect the value of subscribing while asking whether the size of that discount still makes sense.
A low advertised price only improves access if people can actually buy something worthwhile at that price. Look at where your lowest-priced inventory sits, how much of it exists, and when it is available.
If the cheapest ticket technically exists but routinely means the least desirable seats in the house, what experience of your organization is that price point really creating?
Accessibility is about more than the number printed on the ticket.
How many patrons have opted into memberships, subscriptions, priority booking, or other forms of early access?
Then ask the more important question: what advantage have you given them?
If prices, availability, and choice remain largely unchanged as the event approaches, there may be little reason for anyone else to change their behavior.
Early booking should have value, whether that’s better choice, better pricing, greater flexibility, or access that simply isn’t available later.
This is about more than unsold inventory. It’s about the behavior your pricing and availability are creating.
If patrons repeatedly find plenty of good seats at similar prices close to the performance, you may be teaching them that there’s little reason to commit earlier.
Look at when inventory is selling, where demand is strongest, and how availability changes as the performance approaches.
What did last season teach your patrons about the best time to buy?
The answers to these questions are already sitting in your data from last season. The important part is looking at them while you still have time to do something with what you find.
If you’re heading toward a spring 2027 on-sale, this fall is the window to understand what happened last season, decide what needs to change, and build those decisions into your pricing before renewals and announcements begin.
Bring us your average paid prices, subscriber yields, seat map, sell-through, and booking patterns. We’ll help you explore what the data is telling you, where your pricing may be leaving opportunity on the table, and what you could do differently for 2027.