Audience Rewards and other Broadway loyalty programs that reward its clients with benefits to Broadway shows.
Broadway Loyalty Programs Reward Clients With Benefits to Broadway shows.
Discounts on Broadway tickets are often granted as a loyalty reward to clients who use a particular service or product. These discounted Broadway tickets are often limited to just the buyer, the points don't amount to much in dollar value, there may be charges to be in the program (that may outweigh the value) and the points may expire if not used in a pre-determined time.
Two Types of Broadway Loyalty Programs:
- Those that get points from Broadway tickets sales only
- Those who get points from other products or services, e.g. Cable TV subscribers (IE non-Broadway)
AudienceRewards.com Broadway Loyalty Program
A new approach to the fan loyalty programs is audiencerewards.com, which likes to dub itself as "The frequent flyer program of the arts" is operated by Nederlander Theaters under the guise of the "Broadway Fan Club" - its investors are also The Shubert Organization and Jujamcyn Theaters. The Broadway show producers ultimately pay for this service through a charge back.
In this Broadway ticket service, the Broadway theatergoer amasses points by buying full price theatre tickets and then once enough points have been purchased they can cash in these points for free Broadway Theatre tickets - similar to American Express Rewards Points. The potential problem with this service, however, is that the any savings that are made by getting free Broadway show tickets may be grossly outweighed by the fact that they must purchase full price tickets instead of the discounted ones that are all-to-often available for most Broadway shows.
This system might work well for people who only ever go to the brand new show, soon after they open, which is the only time that they don't usually offer discounts to their Broadway tickets. Although many Broadway shows do offer discounts, they also offer full-price tickets in the very best sections in the orchestra - these tickets do qualify for points in the program because the tickets are at full price.
Is It Worth It?
The AudienceRewards.com program typically gives two points for every dollar spent on participating Broadway show tickets (Not all shows are in the program making this more complicated). For point redemption, orchestra Tickets for the Broadway show Wicked are 12,000 points in this program - these tickets would usually cost $147.50 if bought at the box office for cash.
This means that every point is worth $0.012.29, that is effectively just above 1 cent for each point. The net value to a Broadway customer is 2 points per dollar, therefore for each dollar spent, the program gives the client 2.5 cents back. A normal orchestra ticket to a Broadway show costs about $140.00, using this point system it will provide a net extra benefit of $3.50.
Optimum Rewards Program
Optimum online has recently had a big push on to reward its TV, internet and phone customers with discounts to live events in the New York City Area, but the value of these rewards are quite poor - often leading to a client actually having to pay far more for a ticket through this service than on their own. Most of the Broadway offers listed on the Optimum Rewards discount pages are not discounts at all, but are links to ticket broker sites (Which often raise the base ticket price considerably)
The offer is for a 10% discount on ticket that are already marked up in value, so the net benefit is negative to a client, who may do better by buying a ticket directly at the box office - in the rare case that a show did not have any tickets available at the box office, it was seen that a lower priced ticket could be put chased on Stubhub.com than from going with Optimum Online's choice of 3rd party Broadway ticket vendor. It is unknown if Optimum has negotiated a commission from this 3rd party ticket broker.
