In an age where the norm seems to be adding more and more seats and expansions run rampant, some renovations to Tropicana Field, home to Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, reverses the seating capacity trend.

The domed venue is undergoing a number of improvements and renovations designed to enhance the customer experience. For starters, a new social meeting area called the Left Field Ledge will arrive as a full-service bar with seated drink rails and ledge tables. That’s not all, as the playing surface will have new turf installed, LED lights will provide a brighter venue, and upgrades to two of the stadium’s entry gates are also scheduled. The team has pumped more than $50 million in renovations since 2005, including more than $15 million in just the past two years.

Oh, about that seating arrangement. The venue’s capacity for baseball drops from 31,000 to 25,000 with the biggest change closing off the upper level. Just think of it akin to what performing arts venues and arenas are often able to do when making their facilities more intimate depending on the attendance.

The team will hold a Fan Fest at the stadium on February 9 for season ticket holders to see the improvements and renovations at Tropicana Field in advance of the 2019 season. As for those who have season tickets in those upper levels, they will have the option to relocate to an upgraded location.

ParkWhiz Inc. announced that it is rebranding as Arrive Inc., capping its transformation into the leading provider of solutions for the last mile of connected mobility. Arrive’s fully integrated platform helps companies and brands easily offer parking and other mobility-related services to drivers, fleets, and connected vehicles. Using app, voice and in-dash technology, Arrive’s branded and white-labeled solutions can surface convenient parking options and additional services to drivers at various touchpoints. Arrive powers hundreds of partner-branded experiences in addition to the highly-rated ParkWhiz and BestParking mobile apps, which have millions of active users across North America.

“When we parked our first car in 2007, route planning and in-car connectivity services were luxuries. Today, these are essential components of consumer journeys, and we are excited to play an integral role in powering them,” said Yona Shtern, CEO and Executive Chairman of Arrive. “While our consumer brands are strong and gaining in popularity, we believe the future of parking lies within vehicles, navigation systems, and other touchpoints.”

More than 40 million customers in 230 cities across the U.S. and Canada have access to the largest transactional parking network in North America through Arrive-powered parking reservations and drive-up, friction-free parking. Arrive provides transactional parking services for hundreds of partners within their own apps, websites, and emails. Arrive’s partnerships include professional sports teams and venues, events, travel providers, airlines, hotels, automotive OEMs, and navigation systems.

“The Arrive brand represents the culmination of our evolution as a company into an enterprise business that powers the full range of mobility services in collaboration with and on behalf of our partners,” Shtern said.

In April 2018, the company acquired Tel Aviv-based Codi Park and launched the Arrive Network, its powerful friction-free parking solution. Any driver using an Arrive-powered app or registered vehicle can experience seamless payments and frictionless entry and exit at participating lots and garages. The company recently completed its latest financing, raising $25 million in new equity funding from investors such as NewSpring Capital, Alate and Amazon’s Alexa Fund.

Welcome to 2019, a year that will continue the successes we have all collectively achieved recently.

As CEO of the IAVM Foundation, we thought it important to get the new year started with a brief recap of what the capable Board of Trustees have been up to and their fund-raising strategies for the coming year.

We finished 2019 with a successful program of offering CFP Semi Finals Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic tickets to our members and the general public. We surpassed our goal of $6,000 and generated approximately $7,600 in funds for the Foundation.

The Foundation strategic plan is broken into four initiatives, and I want to focus this letter on one of those initiatives.  Our Fundraising Initiative of Venues donating has begun, and with a quick start, has raised $20,000 in less than two months work. The goal to reach prior to the end of the current Fiscal Year (March 31, 2019) is $60,000.

Most of our venues have a budget for community investment; for example, purchasing fund raising banquets, sponsoring golf events, social clubs such as ROTARY, Kiwanis, etc. These donations are a sponsorship and raise funds for our young professionals, students, and IAVM professional development, which pays big dividends to the individual and the venue they work in, while creating a strong organization in the community they and the venue serve.

Many of our professionals have been positively affected by the IAVM programs including Venue Management School, Venue Data Source, Diversity Leadership, 30|UNDER|30, UpStart, AVSS, SES, along with scholarships, internships, and Grants to attend important and relative professional development programs.

Thank you to all who have donated, especially those who make recurring donations, you are making our industry stronger and paving the way for inclusiveness for the Association.

Happy 2019!

Brad Mayne, CVE
IAVM, President & CEO

The San Diego City Council approved a partnership between the legendary and iconic San Diego Sports Arena’s management company, AEG Management SD, LLC, and Pechanga Resort Casino of Temecula, CA, for a new naming rights deal for the now Pechanga Arena San Diego. The venue, built in 1966 and able to hold up to 16,100 for certain events, was most recently named the Valley View Casino Center.

The venue has hosted the biggest and the brightest throughout its famed history, including artists Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, The Grateful Dead, KISS, Bee Gees, ABBA, Heart, The Scorpions, Van Halen, Dio, and hundreds more over recent years including Jason Aldean, Muse, Justin Bieber, Janet Jackson, Lana Del Rey, and Slayer.

Its sports history is as equally famed as the current NBA Los Angeles Clippers once called the venue home as the San Diego Clippers. It has hosted boxing, track and field, World Team Tennis, WWE, soccer, hockey, lacrosse, indoor football, and more.

The venue currently has three anchor sports tenants in the San Diego Gulls, San Diego Sockers, and San Diego Seals.

“We have several partnerships with organizations that are synonymous with Southern California entertainment including the Lakers, the Angels, and Staples Center,” Pechanga Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro said in a statement. “Believe it or not, the San Diego Sports Arena is the closest major arena to Pechanga, so when they reached out to us, we were excited by the opportunity to partner with this historic venue.”

“We are thrilled about this partnership with Pechanga Resort Casino,” added Ernie Hahn, senior vice president and general manager of AEG Management SD, LLC. “The Pechanga name and reputation carries a lot of weight in the entertainment industry. This partnership will afford us new opportunities and ensures that San Diego will continue to receive the best in premium entertainment and sporting events.”

“Large-venue naming rights opportunities rarely avail themselves within the Southern California entertainment landscape,” said Jared Munoa, President of the Pechanga Development Corporation. “We’re very pleased to have been considered for this possibility. We think it’s a reflection of the Pechanga brand and the refinement it carries. A lot of San Diegans are familiar with Pechanga and who we are, and this partnership helps us strengthen that connection.”

The five-year, $400,000-per-year deal gives the venue continued revenue for planned improvements. Branding for the arena was finished by December 21 and sets up an exciting 2019 with Justin Timberlake and Elton John already on the concert calendar.

The T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas celebrates it third anniversary in April. If it seems like the 20,000-seat arena has been around longer than that, it should, as the venue has already hosted some of the biggest sporting and concert shows in the world. The National Hockey League also came to Las Vegas and the arena got to host the 2018 Stanley Cup Final between the homestanding Golden Knights against the Washington Capitals. While the final result went in favor of the Capitals, most everything else has been a win in a short period of time.

With success, even for venues, comes higher expectations.

Now, the arena is using customer data in even greater ways, including how to determine how many staff is needed for specific events and to handle the always sticky situation of traffic in and around the facility. Purchase a ticket online and the venue can answer some of those questions from the purchaser’s data, including addresses from where the buyer will be coming.

Yes, it is an example of technology at its finest and geared to make the guest experience a pleasurable and seamless one.

Online activity has become one of the latest ways for such information to be gathered. Before, most data gathered on patrons arrived from trade publications or getting a guest to stand still for a moment to answer a few survey questions while at the venue. While those still exist to lesser extents, it is the online experience that drives more specific data today.

Crowds at T-Mobile Arena are 70 percent tourists for most events, based on the ZIP codes of purchases. For other events, like Golden Knights games, the mix is 80 percent local — adding that many more cars to parking and traffic around the arena.

That knowledge has helped reduce the time it takes to clear vehicle traffic from surrounding parking garages from 43 minutes to a more palatable 30 minutes.

Inside, technology is king, and the arena does its part to give guests fast connections to do what most customers do these days when attending events — share the experience through social media with friends.

Best for the venue is that those who use internet connection agree to allow data collection, another tool key for not only marketing but enabling T-Mobile Arena to be better equipped to serve and deliver. In all, the arena now has some 750 networking hardware devices that connects guests to the internet.

It is but part of the new experience for both venue and guest, and one example of delivering customer service in a different way.