How Navy Athletics Filled Open Adjacent Seats with Paciolan iQ
Naval Academy Athletics (Navy) added 8,000+ new season tickets over the last three seasons. When you reseat that many fans, the blocks never line up perfectly. A single seat opens up here, a pair there. Those open seats are too isolated for a group and too scattered for a single-game buyer, which makes them some of the hardest seats in the building to sell. The person most likely to buy one is already sitting right next to it, if you can figure out who that is.
The Challenge
Finding open adjacent seats means combining data across every event, seat and neighbor. For years, Jordan Albright, Navy’s Associate AD for Ticket Sales and Digital Marketing, did that work manually, pulling multiple reports and working through them in Excel.
First, you need every seat that exists for every event, not just the ones that sold. Then you work out which blanks are actually sellable based on hold codes. A season seat only counts if it’s open for every game, so each one has to be checked across the whole schedule.
From there, openings must be manually grouped into blocks, then each block individually checked to identify the season ticket holders seated on either side.
And once the list is built, it's a snapshot that goes stale fast. This process took hours.
The Solution
With Paciolan iQ, Navy replaced its multi-step process with the Open Adjacent Seat dashboard. The data stays current, there's nothing to piece together, and Jordan can see everything in one place.
The dashboard shows each open seat block with the account holder on either side: left customer, open seat block, right customer. Navy chooses which account details show up next to each neighbor, so reps can see at a glance who to offer the seats to first.
A fresh list is ready whenever Jordan needs one, with no manual work to redo.
“Running reports, running revenue numbers, all of that is now living under one hub for us. We have those numbers at the snap of a finger, which we did not before. And on top of that, customer service from Paciolan is white glove.” — Jordan Albright, Associate AD, Ticket Sales & Digital Marketing, Navy Athletics
The Results
18.5% conversion, well above the 5% to 12% a call list like this usually lands.
75% reduction in time to find open adjacent seats and who to call.
No stale lists. Reps work from what's actually available today, not a snapshot that went stale while they worked the list.
Navy filled some of the hardest seats in the stadium to sell this season, and that’s a win. The bigger payoff is that these are season tickets, and Navy renews about 95% of them each year. That revenue doesn't have to be won again next season.
30% more value from every seat. Scattered single seats can be hard to sell game by game. As season tickets, they sell once, and with Navy’s strong renewal rate, they’re filled for the full season and well positioned to renew year after year.
Navy spent no media dollars, bought no lists, and sold only to customers it already had. Selling those same seats one game at a time would have taken up to ten times as many transactions, and every seat would have had to sell for every game just to match the revenue. Instead, Navy leveraged Paciolan iQ to turn the stadium's most scattered inventory into some of its most reliable revenue.
