"New and Improved" Seating

I tend to cut arts organizations a good amount of slack in my business dealing with them, expecting artistic excellence but not necessarily operational excellence. However, fooling around with our long-held subscriber seats, that's another story.

Yesterday, we got a letter from the symphony with the big headline at the top:

New and Improved Seating for the 2007-2008 Season

Dear Third Tier Subscriber:

How personal!

You are very important to the Seattle Symphony... blah, blah ... we are making some changes to our pricing and seating structure for the 2007-2008 season

Translation: We are raising the price of your tickets next year

However, we are delighted to let your know that your current price category is now available on the Orchestra level...

Well, that's nice, but I have no desire to sit there.

Because we believe you will enjoy Seattle Symphony even more from these Orchestra level seats, we are automatically upgrading you for the 2007-2008 Seat to seating on the main floor.

WHAT?!

Your renewal invoice will include your new Orchestra level section.

You changed my subscriber seats?! OUTRAGE!!

In addition we will hold your current Third Tier seats should you wish to remain in that section at the increased price.

Oh, they didn't really change my seats after all. But they are going to sock me with a HUGE price increase.

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So, what is going on here? I think the symphony has figured out that the "cheap seats" those of us have in the first couple of rows of the Third Tier are actually some of the best seats in the house. Drake and I sit in the first row, just a bit left of center, which provides a better view of the soloist than dead-center. The sound in the Third Tier is superb -- some say it's best up there.

What's frustrating is they didn't give us any idea in this letter about how much the increase will be. If they are looking to re-seat people I can only assume it will be huge. We got a weird call a couple of weeks ago from the Symphony telling us they wanted to give us a "complimentary seat upgrade" for our next concert (an offer we ignored). I suspect that call was a part of this "upgrade" [HA!] initiative.

I mean, how dumb do they think we are? They are UPGRADING us next year to seats that are LESS EXPENSIVE than our current seats? I'm no economist, but I'd call that a DOWNGRADE.

My main problem with this letter is that it a) provides no real information and b) assumes I'm not going to get the real story here.

I suspect they are going to get A LOT of calls on this one.