LPGA Eyes Fan Insights With SeatGeek Ticketing Partnership
The LPGA has signed its first tour-wide ticketing partnership with SeatGeek as it looks to learn more about its fans—insights that have long been absent from the golf association’s arsenal. Until now, ticketing for LPGA events has been handled by a fragmented group of individual tournament operators, who were under no obligation to report data back to the LPGA.
Under the multiyear deal, SeatGeek will exclusively ticket all U.S.-based tournaments for the LPGA starting with the 2024 season. Tickets to some of next year’s events—approximately 20 of which will take place stateside and fall under SeatGeek’s domain—will go on sale through the platform this summer, giving fans a single destination for domestic ticketing and on-site tournament information.
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Financial details of the deal were not disclosed. The Aspire Group handled the LPGA’s bidding process.
“[This partnership] is number one about making it easier for our fans to find and purchase tickets to come and support our athletes,” Matt Chmura, the LPGA’s chief marketing, communications and brand officer, said in an interview. “Then number two, it’s for us to be able to create a deeper and more meaningful relationship with the fans that do come to our events.”
Chmura said that while unified ticketing in the U.S. is the starting point, global is the end goal. “Eventually, we would love to have this level of engagement with all our fans throughout the world.”
The LPGA will be SeatGeek’s first golf partner. In addition to managing tournament ticket sales and inventory, SeatGeek will use its back-end technology, called Unify, to gather data that the LPGA will mine for a deeper understanding of fan behavior and more targeted marketing. The data Unify collects is available to SeatGeek partners in real time, allowing the LPGA to cater the alerts, features and offers available to fans on-site based on their unique usage habits. The league can then use SeatGeek’s event-day operating system, Rally, to deploy those more personalized experiences.
“Data without action is simply a waste,” Danielle du Toit, SeatGeek president, said. “[I’ve] seen many cases where organizations pay prolific amounts of money to store huge amounts of data, but don’t do anything with it. An incredibly powerful thing about Unify is you’re storing data that you can act on, and all the rules engines are built into it so that can happen automatically.”
SeatGeek, which recently raised money at a $1 billion valuation, was founded in 2009 as a secondary sales platform though its business now extends to primary ticketing sales and related technology. The LPGA will join four NWSL clubs and half of the Premier League (including Manchester City and Liverpool) as SeatGeek partners, alongside eight MLS clubs and a handful of NBA and NFL teams.
“We’re incredibly excited [about the] opportunity for us to further support women’s sport and to work with an organization that cares about innovation and fan experience and is really looking to take a big step forward,” du Toit said. “We want to shake the status quo.”
Earlier this year, the ticketing platform announced an exclusive deal with Learfield-owned Paciolan, one of the largest ticket vendors in college sports, and a five-year resale partnership with Major League Baseball—extending its influence across all five major U.S. leagues. The ticketing company also reportedly filed confidential IPO documents with the SEC earlier this month, one year after attempting to go public by way of SPAC acquisition.
The LPGA, for its part, has seen tremendous growth. The league will distribute more than $101 million in purses in 2023 after significant increases in sponsor commitments across 33 official events, good for more than 500 hours of broadcast inventory. Increasing the prize pools and earnings for players was among the many goals Mollie Marcoux Samaan set when the former Princeton athletic director took over as LPGA commissioner in 2021.
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