We"re looking for some further feedback on Season Seven, and particularly on a topic that involves your money, so I wanted to bring this discussion onto a separate post to ensure it isn"t missed by anyone.
Firstly, I"m confident we"ll be able to announce the Season Seven tour dates once Wembley is out of the way. DTD have been wholly focused on the ISPT for the past few weeks and as a result we haven"t locked down our S7 festivals there yet. However that will follow quickly once everyone has gathered their breath from the ISPT. We (APAT & DTD) are aware of the dates and events in question, we just need Simon to look at in detail and confirm resource availability.
So to seat reservations, a service that we"re considering making a £5 charge for in Season Seven.
As a bit of background, APAT offered players the ability to reserve seats ahead of the last WCOAP and we are doing so again with the Masters event at Wembley. In principle I think this is a really good service and allows players to book holidays at work and accommodation safe in the knowledge that their APAT seat is guaranteed. This is good for us and our members.
However, there are some downsides to how the service operates currently, predominately:
1. The administration of managing and amending player lists right up to the event taking place - this is largely driven by cancellations, which ran to about 20% at the recent WCOAP.
2. The lack of seat availability for new players, who may not be aware of our initial on sale dates - this is because seats tend to get reserved quickly, and new players do not often come back to see whether those seats have become available at a later date due to cancellations.
So what we"d like to do is to offer seat reservations with a £5 charge for all events in Season Seven.
Now of course some events are more popular than others, so there may be no need for you to guarantee a seat in advance for those specific events - but we"ll offer it anyway and of course it will always be optional. Direct buy in on the day at a casino will not feature the reservation charge as you would expect. Similarly, players qualifying through our online satellites will have their seats guaranteed without needing to pay any additional reservation charge.
A real positive here is that we will be able to put a "Pay Now" link to all of our events on the APAT home page well in advance of the events taking place. This will provide an immediate call to action for new members landing on the APAT sites; and we have over 5,000 unique players landing on APAT.com a month alone. It will stop us managing the tour in four week cycles, which ties up our resource in the wrong areas. We are a small team and should be focusing on developing our offer for you, not continually administering it.
This will also generate some revenue for APAT. The service provider will charge a merchandising fee of around £1 for the online card transaction. So APAT would get around £4 of the reservation fee per player, and I think it"s important that we continue to generate revenue, as operator marketing budgets are not what they used to be in the industry.
Ultimately we want players to support our revenue generation through playing online with APAT or our partner sites, but that isn"t for everyone, so this is an alternative opportunity for you to show support for the tour; which was the UK"s first.
Some of the questions that I think you might ask are:-
1) Will we be able to continue to buy in directly through the APAT client?A: No, this is an admin nightmare that requires the seat sale to be taken offline two weeks before the event so that your money can be transferred to the casino. It involves a lot of admin and form filling and constant checking to see where the money is and is anything but a stable run up to the event. It also involves a lot of juggling with currency conversions and has led to additional costs for both APAT and our members on occasion in the past.
2) Can you extend the "seat reservation" payment to include "full event" payment?A: In theory we could, but the merchandising fees are prohibitive on an £82.50 transaction and it would also require us to close off the event at least two weeks in advance to receive the money and then transfer it on to the casino. So it"s possible, but not an ideal solution. The £5 seat reservation fee is not part of the £82.50, so it would not be passed on to the casino or create the additional admin.
3) I reserved a seat and need to pull out at a later date, can I get my £5 back?A: Unfortunately not, it"s the cost of having your name go on and off the list, and the merchandising fees associated with that. Hopefully this small charge will be enough to encourage players to be reasonably sure they plan to attend the event in question, but not so much that it will hurt you if your plans change.
4) Can I reserve multiple events in the season now?A: Yes, it is our aim to put as many of the events on sale at the start of the season as is possible. I believe that will drive a significant increase in player numbers and prize pools across the season.
5) Has APAT's focus changed and is it now all about making money?A: Our focus has had to change since launch, as the market we operate in (indeed created) has changed around us. However one thing we"ve always strived to do is to offer well structured, competitive & community orientated tournaments to our members and that remains our core objective. We announced the acquisition of poker.co.uk last year and that generates revenue when you guys play on it, once we have covered our monthly guarantees to the network. Similarly we"ve just acquired the Live Pub Poker League and that will also generate revenue and enable us to offer some interesting new events in the coming weeks....look out for the APAT Home League for example. We"ll also launch a very innovative fantasy product (not that sort of fantasy) in the near future, that should widen our reach considerably. And when we do spend money, we do so very wisely, those of you who have seen me at a bar will understand that!
6) We don"t want to spend £5 to reserve a seat, does that count for anything?A: Yes, of course it does. One thing we pride ourselves on is our willingness to listen to our customers. Some will say this idea is fine and others will say it"s wrong, and we"ll take a consensus of opinion from this thread before finalising our approach. All that I ask is that you give the idea fair consideration.
Over to you the jury!
