Nice message from the Theatre and Concert Visit Promotion Foundation: last year, we went out again quite often after the lockdowns, and also gave each other a unique experience as a gift quite often. 138,000 stage visits were gifted. That earned the SPTC a nice 6.6 million. That means the Pokadoka (Podium Gift Card) included an average gift of 48 euros.
A nice boost for the sector, which was plagued by cancellations and lockdowns, and - not insignificantly - vouchers in 2020 and 2021. But, if we read the press release correctly, it is also a huge improvement on 2019, as it says: "After two years of immense decline and the final lockdown at the beginning of 2022, this resulted in a revenue recovery of over 90% for Podium Gift Card compared to 2019." Business sales also doubled compared to that precorona year.
2020 we prefer to forget
So what exactly is going on here? Probably a mistake, as the annual report on 2019 reports sales 1.3 million higher than in 2022. Also, 175,000 tickets were given as gifts then. So that was considerably higher than last year. Perhaps the mistake has something to do with the absence of a similar 2020 piece on the SPTC's website. (though there is a annual accounts)
What the press release further reveals is that sales of Podium gift cards are back at the 2013 level. that was at the end of a period when the SPTC's parent, the Association of Theatre and Concert Hall Directors (VSCD), was in serious trouble after directors had lost most of the so-called 'freefall', the money you have left over from unredeemed tickets, in an Icelandic investment adventure. At the time, we extensively reported on.
Currently, the release rate is again just over 20 per cent, which is the calculation number that the CPNB (of the Boekenbon) also uses. The question now is how inflation and the crisis will affect sales, and especially the cashing-in of the pokadoka.
We can only be sure of 1 thing: not all at once please.
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