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Vikings confident no fans will be turned away

The team's vice president of sales and marketing expressed confidence fans that come to TCF Bank Stadium on Monday will be able to get in.

December 17, 2010 at 11:27PM

Vikings chief marketing officer Steve LaCroix said today that polling done by the team is showing that fans who do come to Monday night's game at TCF Bank Stadium on the University of Minnesota campus will be able to get into the building.

"At this point we can't guarantee that, but we're feeling very confident that there's going to be no one turned away from the game," LaCroix said during a news conference at Winter Park. "As we get a little bit closer to Monday we'll continue to update [fans] on that."

LaCroix said the Gophers home stadium will hold just under 54,000 fans on Monday, with 3,000 people able to use a standing room area in the open end zone on the west side of the venue. The Metrodome seats about 64,000.

The Vikings are allowing fans with tickets into Monday's game on a general admission basis until the stadium fills up.

The team has been conducting polling by sending out surveys to their season-ticket holders to find out how many seats they purchased and how many they plan on using. "It's the old early returns and early poll like in a political campaign," LaCroix said of the system. "We're trying to make some conclusions there but we feel good that we're going to be right where the numbers need to be. But, again, we can't guarantee it. I think some of that relief should be there amongst our fans that we're not going to be turning away thousands and thousands of people from the gates."

LaCroix said there were six or seven different plans that could have been used to handle the ticket situation but the short time frame made things very difficult.

"There's a lot of different ways to do it," LaCroix said. "If we had six weeks instead of six days I think we would have come up with some other things to consider, but when you only have that little time to get in touch with all 63,000 people that have tickets and a lot of these tickets were distrubted months ago it's very hard to then get that back to the original source to kind of reset the deck as they say.

"We feel like this was the best plan. Is it the fairest plan? Everyone has a certain reason why they don't like it or do like but again we thought this was the best way to do it. Quite frankly, the alternative was taking it out of town and playing our second home game away from the Twin Cities and away from our Vikings fans."

Some other items of interest from LaCroix:

On fans potentially losing their seats when they get up Monday night to go to the bathroom or concession stand: "There's definitely a concern among fans that they're going to lose their seat when they go use the bathroom and, again, we hope common sense prevails. We hope Vikings fans treat other Vikings fans with the right kind of respect and you hope that Minnesota nice prevails. It's not an ideal situation, but we all have the common feeling, 'Let's make this a fun night and let's not make it a confrontational type of night.' It should be a night to have fun."
The Goophers have 60 entry gates to TCF Bank Stadium, and right now the Vikings have a plan for at least 84 entry gates and potentially up to 100.
On the fact that tailgating will not be possible: "That was another timing issue. Six days with nearly 2 feet of snow piled up on parking lots, it's a Monday night, it's finals week, school's in session. Just wasn't enough space to make full use of it. Ideally, you'd have a full tailgating experience but again the Gophers are on Saturday during warmer weather. They just don't have some of the issues that we're facing this weekend."
On the best parking options: "There's a couple of things that we're working on that are new. One is Metro Transit is going to increase their bus service. Another thing is the State Fairgrounds are working on a parking plan to park there and run shuttles. Then obviously you have other ways to get to campus, but we just want people to carpool and be smart about their plans to get to the stadium."
The Vikings are still working on the "exact number of spots" that will be available for paking on campus. It will probably be another day an estimate can be made. Meetings are taking place at the university today to discuss that situation.
As far as security, the University of Minnesota will have an increased number of gate ushers, the Vikings will have their security firm at the game and the NFL will have members of its special-events staff on hand.
The Metrodome has about 90 suites and TCF Bank Stadium has about 40, meaning the Vikings are doing a lot of "partnering" of its suite clients because the suites in the new stadium are bigger than in the Dome.
If for some reason fans don't get in the Vikings "will have their ticket, customer service staff there at the gates. We'll be able to track as the numbers build into the building and then once we know that we're starting to reach that cutoff number, if that's the case, we'll have a full team out there to handle those situations. If you can't get in the building we are going to refund you the face value of your ticket. There will be a process for that. We're not going to be handing out cash on the sidewalk. But it will be a process to make sure that everyone's made whole for the face value again. We can't necessarily duplicate what you paid for it on the secondary market because that's hard to verify. All we know is the currency of what that ticket is worth in our system."
The Vikings are planning to use Williams Arena, which is across the street, as a "warming house" and then maybe enabling any fans that don't get in to be in the building. "We'll probably announce some things over the weekend as we get a little bit more dialed in on the details."