Town MDs Ian Milne and Jonathan Symonds say the club have no plans to drop matchday ticket prices, despite many fans believing they are too high. The duo have revealed that the club plan to offer half-season tickets at Christmas.
There has been criticism of the club’s matchday pricing with the cheapest adult seat bought on the day of a Grade A game, such as the Leeds match, costing £34.50.
Milne told TWTD that the club feel they’ve got the balance right: "We’ve looked at the figures and really our gate hasn’t come down.”
Symonds continued: "We constantly look at all aspects of the club and ticket pricing clearly is a very sensitive issue, and if we felt that we could bring them down, we would.
"But we are in a position now where we’ve set them for the season, and of course we’ll review them, but that is where we came to.
"We don’t take any of those decisions lightly, they are well thought-out decisions. We look at the big picture.
"Of course we look at them and the one thing that fills stadiums is success, and success, we’re hoping, is on its way.”
Milne added: "We agree they’re not cheap but we would also say they’re not that expensive for the entertainment that is being provided.
"I think you have to balance it, again there’s Financial Fair Play in that, there’s so much the owner’s prepared to put in and it’s only fair that there should be a contribution from the club and the income it generates, including the ticket revenue.
"So, it is a balance, nobody likes to increase prices, certainly we don’t, but we’ve got it about right and the gates tell us that up to now it doesn’t appear to be a major problem.
"We offer very good season ticket opportunities and what we will do at Christmas, and we’ve already had quite a bit of interest from the public, is half-season tickets.
"We’ll look at that, we’d also like the opportunity of giving value for kids as well. So to answer the question, we’re unlikely to bring prices down.”
Meanwhile, the MDs say they will assess the alternatives available when the contract with FLi, the providers of the much-criticised official club website, is up in 2017.
"At the end of the contract we’ll evaluate all the options,” confirmed Symonds. "There is a lot of work goes in and we have to work with what we’ve got.
"It was a long contract and at the end of it we’ll look at it and see what the offering is at that stage. We’d like to see a much better website.”
Milne continued: "We have developed our own website which comes off that, ITFC Direct, and you can see that a great job’s been done. A lot of that credit should go to Neil Hawes and Patrick Cannon, from the Marcus Evans Group, and Jonathan for that.”
Elsewhere, Milne says the Blues are closing in on agreeing terms with a kit supplier with the current Mitre deal up at the end of the season: "I can’t say anything, we are under a confidentiality term, but it’s very exciting.”
In August TWTD reported that we understood that the club had held talks with potential new kit suppliers, including Nike, while the Blues have recently been wearing Adidas benchwear while awaiting a delivery from current suppliers Mitre.
Photo: ITFC