Cross-subsidised coaches to Sheffield Wednesday to make it an event

addickedandy said:

Good idea but would we get the support to make it worth while. Personally getting pissed off going to Yorkshire.....

I think we would, but it doesn't really matter because the cost is proportionate to the demand and offset by the revenue.

The club would only lose out if nobody extra travelled and it had given up the profit on the usual travellers' fare, but that's negligible next to its revenue split from the total receipts.

And in any case you could make the argument that the usual travellers deserve a break anyway.

cafcsinger said:

A good shout definitely, we got some money for getting through the 3rd/4th round so it seems a reasonable investment for maybe even free coaches? Cheap/free travel and you're talking 1k+ which really would help the team and likely to made the club take this game more seriously.

Of course free travel would be nice, but it's serious money and I don't know how ready the new regime is to commit that. We spent about £80k each taking people to Boro by coach alone in 2006 and similar to Blackburn in 2007. It's also a massive logistical exercise.

You wouldn't recover that from extra away ticket sales, hence I'm suggesting something that can be justified by a business case - albeit with a little tweaking around the actual figures.

SilentAddick said:

Surely the trip to Boro was by plane, I couldn't have imagined enduring a flight crammed in a seat which had half Ryanair's leg space! ;-)

We ran about 80 coaches to both Boro and Blackburn. There were also planes, but most people went by coach.

cafcsinger said:

Fair enough, obviously you know much more about the money aspect to it, is it likely by doing cheap travel we'll lose a significant amount of money?

Depends on the ticket price. For example, if Wendies charge £20 for an adult ticket, Charlton get 45 per cent less the VAT, which is £7.50.

The cost of a coach to Sheffield should be £900-ish. The more people travel overall the higher the average loading per coach. In practice you should be able to sell 48 seats per coach, so at £10 that's £480. After the first few coaches that would go anyway, every adult passenger generates the marginal match ticket revenue of £7.50, so for these coaches you get 48 x £17.50 in total, which is total revenue of £840 - loss of £60 per coach.

Now, not every passenger is an adult and we don't know what Wendies will charge. Plus the club would otherwise probably charge £22 (based on yesterday) and might make £1k profit on running four coaches, against, say, a £1,600 loss on these four at £10 fare. Maybe it ends up £5k down on the deal, but against that it still has the income from the Wednesday fans which offsets it, a bit of goodwill from its own supporters and maybe at the margins increases its chance of getting the prize money for winning.

I'd say that was worth the risk. But I accept if Wednesday charge less to get in or the coaches are a bit dearer the numbers may need tweaking. It's the principle I am putting forward. Even £15 coaches would help, although I think £10 is the optimum.