Even as the sports world continues to find new ways to achieve success amid the pandemic, social distancing will remain a key to doing so for the foreseeable future. Many fans want to return to venues, but will only do so if they can return safely.
There are multiple ways to achieve success with social distancing. Spinzo, a group sales platform for the live events industry, laid out a few of the best examples in a recent video.
The industry standard for distancing fans at the moment is through pre-created pods, where buyers must purchase an entire pod of seats. The trouble with this setup is that teams are not successfully predicting demand for pod sizes. To lead the effort in addressing this, Spinzo created the Loose Pod Model.
“Closer to game time, if pods are unfilled, teams can use Spinzo to sell under a Loose Pod Model, which allows fans to purchase a subset of seats within the pod, and block the remaining from being purchased by others.” said Emmanuel Elmajian, CEO of Spinzo. “This results in a higher sell through of seats that would likely have gone unfilled.”
Spinzo is leading the effort to run social distancing without pods. With Rules-Based Dynamic Allocation, venues do not need to create pods at all. Each organization can set their own spacing rules and fans simply select the amount of seats that they want and Spinzo’s system will find a corresponding number of seats with ample room around that group of seats. As a derivative of that approach, Spinzo also supports a Two Separated Rows Per Party Model. This addresses an additional rule some jurisdictions have which forbids more than two parties in a given row.
Spinzo’s system is highly customizable and allows organizations to choose how they want to separate fans and achieve their revenue goals. The models can be mixed and matched to create rulesets which can be applied to all rows, even rows, odd rows, or specific rows.
“At Spinzo, we’re doing our best to bring innovation to social distancing. We’re always open to new ideas regarding social distancing in venues and invite those with new ideas to reach out to us,” Elmajian said.
