Theater seats are like airline seats, if empty, once the doors have closed, they are worth nothing. To recover their huge investments, Broadway producers are challenged to sell every seat, at every performance. They do it by distributing Discount Codes for selected performances where they expect unsold seats. These are usually applicable for the mid-week performances, or when the show has been running for a while. Discounts vary from 25%-50% off and sometimes even more. The seats provided are usually the best available seats in a given category.
In addition, if empty seats are still available on the day of the performance, they are offered, at the TKTS booth (you are probably familiar with the one at Times Square) at 25% or 50% off. You can certainly buy discount tickets at the TKTS booth, but then you have to do it on the last day, stand in line for hours, rain or heat, hope that tickets for your preferred show are still available, and pay cash
All Discount Offers are "subject to availability". This means that the producers have the freedom to adjust the number of available discounted tickets on a daily basis.
To avoid frustration try the following:
Flexibility pays: try other dates or shows, if the show of your choice is not available.
Patience Pays: the producers may release more discount tickets as the show date nears, so a declined date may become available later.
BroadwayBox Pays: take action and sign up for a free of charge Discount Alert service on BroadwayBox.com. You will be notified by email when a new Discount Offer is available for this show. Sign up for a Discount Alerts
BroadwayBox is a community site. No ticket sales. No membership fees. No cost.
We share Free discount codes for Broadway shows, Las Vegas Events and London theatres, on your preferred date, in advance, from your home
These Broadway show discount codes provide heavily discounted tickets for the shows of your choice, on your preferred date, in advance, from your home.
Nowadays, a Broadway seat has about as many prices as an airline seat. And for mega-hits such as "Wicked" and "Spamalot," the recent introduction of "premium" and "VIP" seats at scalper-caliber rates have eaten into the availability of regular-priced orchestra tickets.
Three things to keep in mind:
There are easier ways to get discount tickets than lining up for a long wait at one of New York's venerable TKTS booths.
Just because a show's "sold out" doesn't mean you can't get a ticket.
Step 1: Start Shopping Online
Forget waiting in line. Forget not knowing what you're going to see till you get there and sacrificing fresh for cheap. Forget having to pay cash. Now you can pull out the plastic and shop for discounts online in advance. And there are lots of them. When last we looked, 23 of the 34 Broadway shows and 72 off-Broadway shows were selling seats at discounts ranging from 20 to 50 percent.
Where to find these deals? Start at BroadwayBox.com, which lists the most offers and doesn't charge to let you see them. This community Web site, the brainchild of an Internet entrepreneur who once paid too much for a ticket, is powered by theater fans who contribute discount codes they find in the mail, in ads, on posters and at show sites. Virtually every Broadway discount will show up at some point on BroadwayBox.com, along with dozens of off-Broadway deals.
Just go to the site, click a show title, read the offer and click to buy tickets. Usually this will take you straight to Ticketmaster.com, where you enter the discount code when prompted for special offers; or to BroadwayOffers.com, the site that handles both discount and premium offers for shows sold by Telecharge. Or you can submit the code to the phone rep or at the box office. Occasionally you may encounter a code that doesn't work, but most do.
Other possible discount sources: classified ads and eBay.com . But before you buy, make sure you know a good deal when you see one: Compare what's on offer with prices found on BroadwayBox.com and Telecharge/Ticketmaster.
Step 2: Dealing With Telecharge or Ticketmaster
Eventually, whether buying at discount, full price or premium, most customers will end up at one of the designated telephone/online box offices, Telecharge or Ticketmaster, to make the actual purchase.
Telecharge service charges can vary, but generally run $6 or $6.50 per ticket plus $2.50 per transaction for Broadway shows, and $5 per ticket plus $1.50 per transaction for off- Broadway when purchased online (50 cents per ticket more if you buy by phone). The same rates apply to discount tickets through Telecharge's sister service, BroadwayOffers.com. Service charges for premium tickets will run higher, sometimes as much as 20 percent of face value (the legal limit).
Ticketmaster "convenience" charges also vary, and you can't find out exactly what fees a ticket will incur until you request specific seats. But by and large, they're about the same as Telecharge's.
A few tips:
Bonus tip: If you want to be among the first to know when tickets go on sale for Julia Roberts's Broadway debut in Richard Greenberg's "Three Days of Rain," you can go to the Telecharge site and sign up for early notification.
Step 3: When a Show Is 'Sold Out'
So Ticketmaster, Telecharge and the box office are all telling you the show's sold out. Yet when you Google the title, the Internet is crawling with sellers offering tickets. That's because savvy brokers snapped them up at the first whiff of a hit and are reselling them at way over face value.
Scattered single seats may be available. But Telecharge and Ticketmaster may not tell you unless you ask.
Standing-room tickets may be available for sold-out performance.
A hotel concierge may be able to obtain tickets through a broker (for big bucks).
Splurge and treat yourself to tickets from Broadway Inner Circle, which offers VIP seating for nine shows; prices are high, but include concierge service and, in many theaters, a private entrance. Tickets are available for "Hairspray," "Sweet Charity," "The Producers," "Movin' Out," "Chicago," "Doubt," "Jersey Boys," "Sweeney Todd" and the Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular; prices range from $180 for Radio City matinees to $301.25 for "Jersey Boys."
Try the free classified site craigslist ( http://www.craigslist.com/ ; click on "new york," then go to "for sale" and click on "tickets"). You might find better deals than those listed above, but they tend to disappear fast. For example, we found the same Saturday-after-Thanksgiving mezzanine seats for "Wicked" for $13 less, but when we rechecked a few minutes later, they were gone.
Finally, there are the time-honored TKTS booths. The two sites, at Times Square and the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan, are operated by the Theatre Development Fund ( http://www.tdf.org/tkts ), a nonprofit service organization for the performing arts. They sell same-day-only tickets to selected shows for 25, 35 or 50 percent off, plus a $3 service charge. They accept cash and traveler's checks only. The caveats are that many of the shows offered are past their prime or are too new to have generated much buzz.
|
