Ascot racecourse made the headlines for all the wrong reasons in many of the Sunday Newspapers after sticking a small orange dot on racegoers who had not got the new dress code quite right for the premier enclosure. Thankfully; they acted quickly to squash this with a full refund to all those attendees of the premier enclosure.
Personally speaking I have no issues with any dress code, I actually like looking smart when I go racing. Although I must admit I never go in winter, mainly because I prefer flat racing to jumps and I tend to go on a spur of the moment if the weather is warm and sunny. My biggest problem is the cost of getting in the courses in the first place, especially the smaller courses like my local (Leicester). For tomorrow’s fixture starts at £12:00 a ticket to me that is just too much for the quality of racing.
The Theme Park Way
I believe the smaller courses like Leicester would increase revenue if they adopted a slightly different approach. I notice that most theme parks offer season pass tickets. Leicester with 6 National Hunt meetings, I think they would be better off offering a NH season pass for say £25.00 for all 6 meetings. This makes the entrance just over £4.00 (if your go all 6 meetings), but at the end of day, plenty would buy the ticket and not go to all meetings.
I would have a guess that Leicester doesnt attract more than 300 paying guests in January & February, it’s overall average attendance for the year is around 1,800 and with plenty of meetings during the summer months, I think that will ramp the overall average.
Following the revamp of the course Towcester offered free admission, although they have introduce a £10 charge on selected meetings. I remember speaking with Kevin Ackerman about the increase in numbers attending the meetings compared to when they charged admission fee’s. He said they had well over 100% increase in attendances since going free and that they had to introduce an entrance fee on Boxing Day & Easter Sunday because the course was bursting at the seems for those days.
I met Kevin before the my very first trading workshop which I held at Towcester back in 2009 and he told me that the course turnover was expected to exceed £2 million that year, but it was the increase corporate activities that paid dividends.
In Summary
It seems that racing goes from one PR disaster to another and they need to get the balance right between people who want to go racing for the love of the sport and those who want to go for the love of drink.
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