What do other users think of theatres selling "Premium Seats"

I've noticed this at many theatres now where a set amount of good stalls seats are sold at a ridiculously high price. I understand that its meant for people to get tickets at short notice but personally I think it just greedy and that is very similar to touting.
I think that £60 pound is enough let alone charging (in some cases) nearly £100 per ticket!!

Does anyone agree?

As I understand it, these seats are not top price seats bumped up to more expensive - they're the house seats, which previously were never publically sold, but reserved for the producers, cast friends, complimentary tickets etc etc. Those seats are separate from all the contracts between production and theatre, so selling them as premium seats earns them a lot more money!

Somehow this comforts me- the theatres can't just bump up all the good top price seats to "premium" on a whim. Just be careful when you're booking tickets to not ask for "Best available", but ask for the £65 seats, or whatever. "Best Available" has become a lot more expensive.

I thought the opposite Belle - theatres can hardly stop keeping house seats back, as surely they're just as likely to need them now as they ever were? And these new 'top' price tickets are hardly likely to be sold last minute.

I think it's obscene. For £100 I can get a return rail ticket (250 mile round trip), my tube pass, park my car at the station, see two shows, buy programmes for each and have a meal in between hand and still have some change left.

To spend £100 on one show (assuming it's not something that is a complete one off), I'd expect them to ship in my own sofa from home, have my own personal usher attending to my every need and bloomin' well have Johnny Depp rubbing my feet in the interval. What a complete nonsense.

I ran into this scam too. I was booking a group for Oliver and was specifically requesting rows FGH in the middle and was told all these and others were now classed as premium seats, were not to be sold to groups and would cost £90 each. I said this has never happened to me before (I have been organising groups for my company for 15 years) and they said it was new and get used to it as all theatres think it a splendid idea to raise more from us theatregoers.
So expect this at all 'must see' shows soon.
I think it is outrageous - especially in the case of Oliver where they also had all the free publicity on the telly and are now charging £90 a throw. grrrr.

Well, I wouldn't "get used to it". If we are now heading for a recession, the theatres will have to get used to lowering their prices and not cheating the public to their greedy enterprises.

I think it is an awful idea. House seats at Wicked are Row Q in the stalls. Not Rows F etc. The view from Row F centre is crap anyway - there is no rake and you miss half of the show because of peoples heads. So not sure ALL theatres use the house seats.

I last saw WICKED about a year ago. I got a day seat for £25 about twenty minutes before the show started. That seat is now in the Premium bracket.

Within one price bracket, there is going to be variance. Under the old system, a £50 ticket could land you at the back of the stalls to the side or centre-middle. So what they're doing is putting in an extra tier within top price, typically centre-middle. It's a way of saying "if you want to guarantee the clearest, most central view, this is the premium".

Personally I won't spend that amount on a ticket. No way. Tonight I'm going to the National to see Russell T Davies talk for 40 minutes on Doctor Who, then seeing the new David Hare play, then seeing Greenwich Theatre's two full days of new musicals on Saturday and Sunday.

The price of all of that?

£14.

I'd quite like to see "Imagine This". Just because it's a new, British musical. I'm not paying £30 for restricted view and I'm not paying £60 to guarantee seeing the stage.

It's a shame because I love commercial theatre as much as subsidised theatre.

Really? I've sat in house seats a couple of times at Wicked and both were around row F/G in the centre block.

There's two sets of house seats - certainly in the big houses - there's a set reserved for the producers, I think that's rows F/G in the Ap Vic, and then another block reserved for the theatre management, which is on row Q there. In this case, indeed the producers' seats aren't great! They look amazing on paper, but did anyone go down and actually check what they were getting? It seems not. On the other hand, row Q is the most amazing place to sit in the Ap Vic - seems too far back but when you sit there, with the aisle in front of you, it's as if the show's being put on just for you. Love it.

So... is row Q in the Ap Vic NOT Premium? That would make sense, I guess, as it's the producers doing the premium seats, the producers making the money that the theatre doesn't get a cut from. That would also mean that there's still a set of house seats available for the various bigwigs etc who would require them.


Russ has a point about how you can guarantee that your best seats are indeed the best seats. But I'd rather see the poorer, over-priced seats knocked down a price band! You never know... it MIGHT happen......

Russ, as regards 'Imagine This' I don't know where the £30 price comes from,
but the following might help (I've just posted it on an Imagine This thread):

The show's at Tkts again today -
though I think that's quite normal, with a new show, in a large venue -
especially as it didn't seem to have Opening Offers (or at least I didn't receive any).

Also, when I looked a couple of weeks or so ago I couldn't find any Restricted Views on sale online -
I thought maybe they were just sold by phone.

But by Opening Day (or maybe by the night before),
Official Show Website page re TICKET PRICES included (and still includes):

QUOTE

Also (NB!):


That seems to suggest that Restricted View Seats up to & including Nov18 are only £7.50....

Its just a way of getting more money from us ticket buyers. Its hard enough to justify £60 per ticket, let alone nearly £100.
This is just an example of touting by the theatres. Its a way of making you think you are getting something significantly better because you are paying more. You are still going to have the same problems of appalling legroom, chatterers etc as any other seat nearby. So occasionally a premium seat comes with a "free" programme. I would expect a lot more than that!

The ticket prices at the moment already are making London Theatre elitist, but this even more so.