Quote ="stormingbronco"As both a season ticket holder and a 'supporter' find the moans, complaints and arguments about 'seating' both depressing and at times totally pathetic.
If you are a 'real' supporter you should be buying a season ticket and if you need to order 'extra' tickets for 'mates/family' etc you just need to ring the club 'requesting' that you all sit togeather. OK you might not have the original view your season ticket provided but it's a small penalty for that game more so if any then become regulars.
To be quite honest that while I agree the QRL 'ticketing' set-up has not been that clever in recent seasons am sure that with our new GM now in place he will be giving this urgent priority for the '10 season.'"
Are you delibdrately winding people up or were you born stupid? If all "real" supporters were STHs we'd never grow our crowds, as who's going to just buy a ST for a club they've never watched before?
There's considerable anecdotal evidence that casual supporters and friends of regular supporters are being put off attending ths season by the allocated seats only policy. I would have invited a friend along on Saturday who's never seen RL before, but I won't as she won't be able to sit with me and I can't be bothered with the hassle of attempting to find out whether I can move from my usual Gold seat to sit elsewhere with my friend. Yes, I could phone the club beforehand and attempt to make suitable arrangements, but what a f***ing palaver when more than two thirds of the seats in the ground are empty, or when I might not know whether friends will be able to make it until short notice.
At every other SL ground I've been to you can pay on the gate to either stand on a terrace or sit in unallocated seats; i.e. you can turn up, find your mates within the ground, and sit/stand with them. At the Stoop you can only go in one reserved seat and if you don't buy adjacent tickets with your mates at the same time as your mates you can't watch the match together.
I fully understand the need to minimise stewarding and staffing costs on matchdays, but by keeping these overheads to an absolute minimum in the short term we're strangling our chances of building our crowds in the medium/long term. (As if we can afford to turn anyone away when our crowds are barely half the next lowest average.)
We've got far too many different price bands; we should just have two price bands: something in the £22-£25 range in the central blocks near the halfwayline (reserved seating) and something in the £17/£18 range in whichever other parts of the ground are open (I accept we shouldn't be opening more than half the seats in the ground until we can fill most of those) with seats unallocated, thereby allowing regulars to sit with their mates who attend occasionally.
