The Good - Events Centre Earns More Than Budgeted On Ticket Venture

By Robert Thomas

Bringing the ticketing in-house and starting up SaskTix to offer event ticketing services province-wide has saw a higher than budgeted return in the first six months of 2022.

In their quarterly financial statement the Moose Jaw Event’s Centre reported $58,510 in actual income when $17,633 was budgeted meaning the regional ticketing initiative earned $40,847 more than budgeted.

“I think the numbers showed us very good things this quarter for the Moose Jaw Event” city manager Jim Puffalt said answering questions in the post Council media scrum from MJ Independent.

Moose Jaw Event Centre’s Statement up until June 30, 2022 - source report to Moose Jaw Council

“As Mr Acker says in his comments that food and beverages is sitting at a $133,000 profit. We know we forwarded some money to get it up and running but that was part of our concept going forward that we need to take control that we can make good money at,” Puffalt said, adding “I think SaskTix is a good example of that. Food and bev (beverages) is a good example of that.”

SaskTix was a controversial initiative for the then Mosaic Place to not go to outside ticketing agencies but rather use Paciolan, a subsidiary of Spectra Events Management (the third party management company of the facility), and offer ticketing services province-wide.

“We are generating more profit than we have before when it was contracted out. Those are things that again as we work our way through a full year, when people return to the building, return to the events that we are going to see the benefits of that planning we have done,” he said.

The need to find a new events ticketing company came in the wake of the Ticket Rocket fiasco where the company went bankrupt leaving ticketholders and event centres worldwide holding the financial bag.

The Ticket Rocket Fiasco saw the City offering to reimburse over $200,000 through non-refundable gift certificates, as a goodwill measure, to customers stung by Ticket Rocket’s bankruptcy equivalent gift cards ultimately costing the City

The statement to June 30, 2022 shows a cost recovery by the facility of 82.15 percent almost ten (10) percentage points above the budgeted cost recovery of 72.63 percent.