A’s to adopt casino-style model for season ticket holders in Las Vegas move

The Athletics plan to treat season ticket holders more like high-value casino customers, adopting a tiered rewards approach modeled on Las Vegas players’ clubs as the team prepares for its move to Nevada.

Team President Marc Badain said sports franchises have historically underinvested in their most loyal customers and need to rethink how they engage with them.

“I don’t think teams spend enough time or money on (season ticket holders),” Badain said. “They become sort of complacent to it. … Especially when you talk about gifting or communication or just emails. I mean, I’m a season ticket holder for a couple of teams, and I see how they do it, and I’m not overly impressed, right? It’s more than just shoving a scarf in a box and sending it to you.”

Under the approach, benefits and gifting would be tailored based on spending levels, similar to how casino hosts allocate perks.

“It doesn’t have to be the same gift for everybody,” Badain said. “Add a little bit of personalization to it. You’re sitting in Vegas, so if you are a gambler and you are someone who has a casino host, that casino host has a budget to take care of you. It’s a function of how much you spend. That same philosophy should apply to sports teams and their season ticket holders.”

Season ticket renewals represent a significant revenue stream for teams. “Say it’s $100 million (in revenue), it’s more in a lot of cases,” Badain said. “What’s the right number for the team to turn around and spend back on those customers? Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but just look at it from an economics standpoint.”

He argued that retaining existing season ticket holders is more cost-effective than replacing them. “The replacement cost is so much more significant than these little touchpoints that you can do,” Badain said. “So, we’re spending a lot of time on that.”

The strategy comes as the A’s develop a $2 billion ballpark in Las Vegas, scheduled for completion in 2028. The stadium will feature 30,000 fixed seats and a capacity of 33,000 with standing room, making it the smallest in Major League Baseball.

Rather than maximize seating, the team opted to reduce capacity to create open, social gathering spaces accessible to all ticket holders.

“There’s probably, five, six, seven areas in the building that I’ll just call social environments that don’t require you to buy a ticket to go to that area - you obviously got to buy a ticket to go to the ballpark - but baseball is a different sport than others, and not everybody wants to sit in their seat for nine innings and watch the game” Badain said. “They want to travel around the ballpark, and we try to make navigating the ballpark as easy as possible.”

One of those spaces will be a large plaza in center field. “That’s going to be a gathering area for fans to watch the game from a different perspective,” he said. “We sacrificed a lot of seats and a lot of seating capacity to create these areas, again, that don’t require a ticket, but allow you, if you’re just buying a seat in the third deck, to go and experience the ballpark from a different vantage point.”

“If you’re coming there and want to sit and watch the game for nine innings, you can,” he said. “If you want to go to this bullpen area and go down in this alleyway and watch the game through the fenceline, you’ll be able to do that. If you want to go up to the third deck at a bar … you can go up there.”