If you’re planning on heading to California on Feb. 7 to catch the Super Bowl showdown between the Denver Broncos and the Carolina Panthers, be ready to have your bank account sacked. Tickets for the big game are currently selling for record-high prices.
SFGate reports that the face value for a single ticket is between $500 and $1,600, but the average ticket being resold on StubHub is sitting at nearly $5,500.
While there are certainly a lot of Broncos and Panthers fans vying for tickets, analysts say it’s not exactly the football lovers who are sending prices sky-high.
The game is being played at the San Francisco 49ers’ new stadium in Santa Clara. Having the Super Bowl in the tech-rich region is attracting a lot of people with venture capital cash to burn.
“San Francisco is an incredibly wealthy market,” said Chris Leyden, a content analyst with online-ticket reseller SeatGeek of New York. “There are a lot of people with disposable incomes. There’s a lot of demand in the Bay Area.”
So far, Cameron Papp, a spokesperson for StubHub, says about 29% of ticket sales for the game have come from California.
In addition to local demand, Papp says the city’s popularity as a tourist attraction and the newness of the stadium have combined to create the ideal conditions for resellers looking to cash in on pricey Super Bowl tickets.
So while face value for the tickets are well in line with other year’s ticket prices, resale costs are steadily climbing.
Prices on SeatGeek range from $3,320 to $12,000, while StubHub’s range from $1,222 — the lowest price paid for an upper sideline seat — to $27,983, the price per ticket for a pair of lower club seats sold for on Monday, SFGate reports.
Papp cautions that prices could fall as the game gets closer, but that the significant drop in costs that past Super Bowls have seen likely won’t happen.
Football fans may have been able to purchase seats from a broker or reseller at a reasonable before Denver and Carolina won their way into the game. But they should be warned: Some unscrupulous brokers have been known to cancel these early orders in an effort to sell them for a much higher price to latecomers with deep pockets. And while StubHub’s policies penalize resellers who cancel orders, the penalties are so low that ticket-flippers can afford to break the rules and still make a huge profit.
Super Bowl 50 ticket price averages a mere $5,461 [SFGate]
by Ashlee Kieler via Consumerist