St. Louis Blues: Why Mobile Ticketing Is Bad Idea

By Todd Panula | Sep 19, 2018

SAINT PAUL, MN - DECEMBER 26: Ticket being scanned before the Minnesota Wild game against the St. Louis Blues at the Xcel Energy Center on December 26, 2009 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. (Photo by Bruce Kluckhohn/NHLI via Getty Images) /

The St. Louis Blues are going to only mobile tickets for the 2018-19 season. It sounds great, but it most likely will not be.

The St. Louis Blues, like any professional sports team, are looking for new ways to improve the fan experience. They have done an excellent job with renovations to their arena, sprucing up the area, improving lighting and seating and more. However, their latest move is going to be met with more mixed results than they know.

In case you missed it, and you may have since the news went by fairly quietly, the St. Louis Blues are going to a 100% e-ticketing experience for the 2018-19 season. While that seems like a reasonable idea, I wonder how fully it was thought through.

I fully admit that for someone in their mid-30’s, I feel like the old man yelling to get off my lawn at times. I just don’t see the need for this other than to cut the cost of paper tickets. If that is the case, then just say so instead of trying to tell everyone how easy and wonderful mobile tickets will be when that will not be the case.

For those of us fortunate enough to have smart phones, I am sure there will be little wrong with e-tickets. Many people use the feature already when buying tickets off third-party websites and even the main partners, such as Ticketmaster have offered e-ticket options.

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So, it is not the e-ticket that I am against, in and of itself. It is more the lack of clarity which the Blues provide about how this service will work.

If you check out the web page about this new development, it is less a story than an owner’s manual. It offers links to app stores to download the NHL app and how to set it up and then has a seven step process by which to claim your tickets.

This is assuming a lot about your audience, however. Regardless what label you want to put on them, there are many people out there that do not own smart phones and several are proud to say they do not need them.

So, if this is literally the only way into the arena, which it honestly looks to be the case, then what happens to those people if they want to attend? Maybe there will be an option to do this through the website and then print tickets, but that’s not what 100% mobile means to me.

What of the extra time this could take, as well? Working in retail, I have seen people that struggled to pull up a photo or email on their phone. Now, we are asking people to navigate through an online app, find the right tab, hope it works or that they get signal at the right spot and then have someone scan their phone. I will be amazed if this does not cause lines to back up, by itself, to be honest.

Another item is the signal. While you can usually get a decent signal until you reach your seat, the coverage for Enterprise Center is spotty at times. What happens when you get that person that paid for their tickets, but can’t get the app to work or has the dreaded spinning circle of doom?

What about battery life? I can’t count the number of people I know that have their phone drop 5% battery life in an instant. Sure, it’s not everyone, but you know you’re going to have people forget to charge their phone, pull it out of their pocket to scan for the ticket and boom…dead as a doornail.

Lastly, we are assuming these programs are going to work, which is always foolhardy. There are so many bugs that pop up in new programs that can’t be foreseen that you know there will be hiccups at the very least.

According to the team’s current ticket policy, they do reprint tickets for free if you purchased them through the Blues or Ticketmaster. Again, this assumes you can prove you bought them through those avenues, which likely means access to a smart phone, etc.

I hope this works. My wife and I have smart phones and I already have the Blues app, so the mobile ticket part is just another feature. I just hope this is not shortsighted thinking.

Despite what society appears to be as a whole, not everyone is up to date on the latest technology or has the fanciest phone. Are we going to be excluding anyone that might otherwise happily buy a ticket because they choose not to have a smart phone or have trouble accessing the app?

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For the Blues sake, I hope I am wrong. I just have a feeling this is not going to be smooth sailing.

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