Q&A: Rams say they won’t rush season-ticket process

Back in January, after they got approval to return to Los Angeles, the Rams launched a season-ticket campaign, and in two weeks received 56,000 deposits from people interested in securing seats for the 2016 season at the Coliseum.

The franchise began working its way through that list a few weeks ago, reaching out to fans in the order they placed their deposits. The first week, the club contacted about 1,000 of those people who plunked down $100 … and that got the Rams only through the first minute of deposits. Each deposit holder is eligible to buy as many as eight season tickets.

The Rams are now on their third wave, having contacted about 8,000 people, which represents the first 15 minutes of the deposit campaign. It’s a slow process -- particularly for those people who have yet to be contacted -- but one the Rams don’t want to rush.

“Our whole view on this is to not be hasty,” said Jake Bye, vice president of ticket sales and premium seating. “This market has waited a long time to get football back, and it’s imperative that we do it right. We have been very thorough and deliberate and giving people a reasonable window to make an educated decision on their purchase.

“We want to have a conversation and develop a relationship with our fans. So that’s why we’re going with smaller groups over longer periods of time, so we can over-deliver on the customer-service piece of this and people are completely comfortable with the process and their decision on seats. We will get through the process in plenty of time. Being hasty didn’t serve our fans. People are champing at the bit -- that’s great, we love that, but it’s not going to motivate us to speed up the process.”

Bye participated in a Times Q&A two weeks ago, and this is an update, with questions posed by readers to the newspaper via email and Twitter. Bye declined to specify how many tickets have been sold so far, but he did shed more light on the ticket situation:

Question: Are there set times for this process of reaching out to deposit holders in waves?

Bye: Yes. A series of emails are generally sent out late in the week notifying the next set of accounts that their window will open the following week. Then that batch of accounts is further segmented in the order the deposits were received. That allows our representatives to handle the deposit holders in segments, as opposed to dealing with thousands of people simultaneously

Are there still good seats left?

Bye: If by good you mean the first row of the 50-yard line, well, now that we’re thousands of people in, it’s a safe assumption that those are gone. People that were there right at 10 a.m. deserve the opportunity to purchase the best seats. But there are still thousands upon thousands of great seats left. The seats closest to the field and closest to the 50-yard line are naturally the first to go.

What percentage of people contacted are buying tickets on the first day they can?

Bye: So far, what we’ve seen is over 75% of the people are responding on the first day they’re eligible to buy tickets.

Will the season tickets be paper or electronic?

Bye: They will be hard copy. When we open the Inglewood stadium in 2019, that ticketing process will be entirely state-of-the-art, but the Coliseum tickets will be hard copy. But people want those first-year tickets as keepsakes anyway. The design on them is to be determined. We’re working through that right now with an agency and with the league.

What are my options if I didn’t put down a ticket deposit? Do I have to wait for the new stadium to open?

Bye: There will be an opportunity to be on a wait list for Inglewood. More information on that is coming later this year. We’ll have a priority wait-list for Inglewood, so that’s a possibility. Depending on the results of the current ticketing process, the single-game opportunity for this season could still be a possibility.

Will there be another way to see the Rams this season?

Bye: There will be a fan-fest at the Coliseum on Saturday, Aug. 6. It will be open to the public. That will be sort of a dress rehearsal for us and for the building. The team will scrimmage. We’ll have all the concessions and everything programmed as if it’s a Rams home game. That will be a great opportunity for people who didn’t place a deposit or buy tickets to still come and be up close and personal with the team.

If the Rams were so thorough in trying to weed out scalpers, why are there so many tickets available on StubHub and other reselling sites?

Bye: The reality is that once people purchase tickets through this process, we we have no control over how they use those tickets. We were and will continue to be aggressive in our attempts to limit sales to known ticket resellers. The goal here is simple: We want as many Rams fans to have access to reasonably priced tickets as possible and we want to create a profound home-field advantage.

What’s the parking situation at the Coliseum, and who will be eligible to park there?

Bye: We have worked with the state and USC to secure as many on-site parking spaces as we can. We will permit those only for our season-ticket holders, and that process will happen later this summer. We’ll reach out to season-ticket accounts in the order in which they placed their deposits.

If you buy season tickets now, does that give you priority once the new stadium opens?

Bye: Absolutely. Our season-ticket members and the next set of priority people will be those who have deposits still on file but were unable to buy season tickets. Then there will be an additional Inglewood priority campaign that we’ll launch at a later date.

Do the quality of seats you buy at the Coliseum have any bearing on the type of seats you can buy in the Inglewood stadium?

Bye: Priority to select seats in the new stadium will be tied to the timing of the season-ticket deposit, not Coliseum seat location. For instance, even if someone early in the process picked an upper-level seat at the Coliseum, he or she is still going to be towards the front of the line for Inglewood and have the ability to purchase seats virtually anywhere in the new stadium.

When can we expect to see personal-seat-license pricing for the new stadium?

Bye: That will be 2017 at the earliest. That’s still far down the road.

With the Coliseum undergoing renovations next year, how will the Rams accommodate fans if their seats are lost?

Bye: We’ll work with USC for any seats that are impacted to replace the seat locations. Unfortunately, due to circumstances we don’t control, buying seats in certain areas might lead to not having the exact same seats in future seasons.

Will there be a season-ticket holder pre-sale to purchase additional single-game tickets before they go on sale to the public?

Bye: If available, that would be later this summer, probably in late July or early August.