Swiss ice hockey club is first to adopt automated dynamic pricing

EV Zug, the Swiss Ice Hockey Vice Champions and the Swiss Ice Hockey Cup Winners 2019, is the first European club in professional sports to introduce fully automated dynamic pricing for the 2019/20 season.

The club benefits from the partnership of its ticketing provider SecuTix with Smart Pricer’s price optimisation software. This allows EV Zug to optimise its ticket prices with the help of machine learning and to automatically adjust prices in real-time via a bidirectional interface between SecuTix and Smart Pricer.

Like many other sports clubs, EV Zug is confronted with varying attendance across home games, although the capacity utilization of its stadium averaged 97% last season. The number of fans mainly depends on the opponent’s popularity, the day of the week and the time during a season.

To overcome this challenge, the ice hockey club conducted a test phase with Smart Pricer last season, offering cheaper tickets for early bookers and less requested games during three championship games. The results were good and prompted EV Zug to join forces with Smart Pricer and to introduce dynamic prices for all National League games in the coming season.

Patrick Lengwiler, CEO of EV Zug, said:

The successful trial phase of Dynamic Pricing in the 2018/19 season convinced us. What’s truly important to us is that we maintain full control over the ticket prices – despite the automation – by setting the price range ourselves.

Even with the introduction of the new pricing system, the season ticket is guaranteed to continue to be the cheapest ticket. This means that the unit price for a single game ticket will never be lower than the season ticket, even during price fluctuations.

Norbert Stockmann, Managing Director – DACH at SecuTix explained:

We are pleased to have found a club as innovative as EV Zug for the pricing partnership with Smart Pricer. We are confident that many more sports clubs will follow this example.

In the 2019/20 season, ticket prices for lower-demand EV Zug home games will drop by 30% compared to last year. This will increase demand, make better use of the stadium capacity and enhance the experience of the fans. The club has decided to focus its dynamic prices on the standing-room tickets as well as on the seating tickets of the price categories 1-6.

Franz Blechschmidt, Managing Director at Smart Pricer, said:

Switzerland has already established itself as a pioneer in dynamic pricing for mountain lifts, so it is exciting to see that with EV Zug the first Swiss sports club has taken a step in the same direction. We are particularly pleased to welcome the first ice hockey team as our partner and look forward to successful cooperation with SecuTix and EV Zug.

About EV Zug

The EV Zug is the largest ice hockey club in Central Switzerland and also an innovative sports company with around 120 permanent employees and 520 part-time employees in the areas of sports, management, junior staff and catering. With 14 junior teams and the in-house training concept “The Hockey Academy”, EV Zug is committed to sustainable and long-term youth promotion and has its own farm team in the Swiss League since 2016. Starting in 1987, the first team of EV Zug has been continuously playing in the highest Swiss league and won 1998 for the first time the Swiss championship title, the 2019 Swiss Ice Hockey Cup and for the fourth time the vice-championship title.

About SecuTix

A pioneer in applying the SaaS model to ticketing, SecuTix is the European developer of an integrated, cloud-based platform for white-label ticketing and audience management. SecuTix 360° provides event professionals with a multichannel ticketing solution to control their distribution, engage their audiences and thus leverage customer loyalty and boost sales. A subsidiary of Swiss systems integrator Elca, SecuTix is headquartered in Lausanne and has offices in Paris, Madrid, London and Munich. Over a hundred businesses, operating in the field of museums, live entertainment, stadiums and sports clubs, municipalities and festivals have put their faith in SecuTix to revolutionise their ticketing processes and provide customers with a unique experience.

About Smart Pricer

Smart Pricer’s team of pricing experts provides cinemas, sports clubs, ski resorts and entertainment venues around the globe with the necessary tools to increase ticketing revenues. We have over 10 years of airline pricing experience and done millions of pricing optimisations, Smart Pricer is the go-to-partner for many top industry players. This includes Europe’s largest cinema chain Odeon-UCI, Germany’s famous sports club FC Bayern München and Swiss Zermatt Bergbahnen AG.