Spotlight on: "Dynamic" Grand Prix Ticket Pricing

Hi hello welcome back!

It’s been a while! My August and September were hectic and filled with three keynotes in three states and an overdue book chapter, so this project had to take a bit of a backseat. But we’re back! And we’re back with me being angry about the price of Formula 1!

Jump to:

• Ticketing for the Melbourne Grand Prix

  • The Before (DTS) Days

  • Pricing

  • AusGP Access

  • Dynamic Disasters

  • Supply and Demand (the ballot question)

  • How should you reward “loyalty”?

  • Conclusion

So. It’s time to talk Grand Prix ticketing. Specifically, it’s time to talk about the scam that is In Demand/”Dynamic” pricing for Grand Prix ticketing.

We’re less than six months away from the 2025 Melbourne Grand Prix (and F1 season opener), but tickets are yet to go on (public) sale. I honestly don’t understand why some Grands Prix go on sale for the next year immediately following their race while Melbourne leaves it until the last minute, but I digress.

If you follow me on social media, you would know that I’ve been annoyed about this for a few weeks now, and as my annoyance has bubbled away we’re evolving from tweets to a full newsletter to vent how frustrating this is from a fan experience perspective.

If you don’t know about In Demand/Dynamic ticket pricing, I envy you. Basically, it’s a Ticketmaster system that allows event organisers to turn on what is ultimately “surge” pricing for events. When demand goes up, prices go up. The very flimsy rationale given is that it helps stop scalping and bots, but in reality, it just makes you pay scalped prices through an official channel.

I know a thing or two about dynamic pricing. In recent weeks, I’ve been used as a media expert in half a dozen stories about why it exists and why fans hate it. Spoiler alert: Because it’s money-hungry and shows zero care for fan loyalty and experience.

So, let’s have a deeper look at how using it is playing out for the Australian Grand Prix.

Ticketing for the Melbourne Grand Prix

The Before (DTS) Days

As is true for most of the world, before Drive to Survive, Formula 1 had a loyal supporter base in Australia, but it was far from universally popular. Even with Aussies like Mark Webber and Daniel Ricciardo on the grid, it was relatively niche and so fans were used to a certain experience and level of treatment.

In these pre-DTS days, Melbourne had a loyalty system called “GP Advantage”, where fans could access future pre-sales and even reserve their favourite grandstand seats. This was all included in their annual ticket. This program was before my time as a fan, but from all evidence it appears it was a successful fan loyalty program that made fans feel valued. So you can imagine how well it went down when this was dismantled due to the rising popularity of the sport.

I’ll return to the loyalty question later in the piece, but I do understand why GP Advantage was no longer considered feasible. If you have existing fans booking out seats a year in advance, as demand grows, you eventually have to prioritise growth and the potential to get new fans through the gate over appeasing those who will come regardless.

But the removal of GP Advantage can be seen as one of the first steps on the downward spiral of access to Albert Park.

Pricing

So let’s talk money.

In 2022 when I discovered F1, GA (or “Park Pass” as they’re known in Melbourne) tickets were still readily available for $189 in mid-January.

For the last two years, however, demand has been so high that tickets go on sale via a pre-sale ballot system (if you haven’t coughed up $200 to buy earlier access - more about this in a second) and sell out almost immediately.

But let’s assume you get through the ballot and to the checkout. What’s happened to prices in this period? They’ve obviously gone up. Now, year-on-year price increases are to be expected. For reference, the 4-day park pass I purchase went from $189 in 2022, to $250 in 2023 (32.3% increase), to $279 (11.6% increase) in 2024, to $309+ in 2025 (10.8% increase). While each of those rises could be considered relatively incremental in isolation, when you look at the bigger picture, it’s a 63.5% increase in four years.

The product has not improved during this time. In fact, in some ways it’s gotten worse. The thing is, not all access is created equal, and universally, Grands Prix put all of their efforts into their hospitality packages and hope other fans feel grateful for making it through the gates. Now, don’t get me wrong. GA at Albert Park is great. But it’s great because you take your friends and a picnic and hang out for a weekend while occasionally watching cars zoom past. There’s not much actually on offer from the organisation to boost fan experience, unless you want to queue all morning for Melbourne Walk, or have kids to make the most of their family zones. So prices are going up, but it’s the same portable toilets and expensive food trucks as it’s always been.

Also, in 2022, there was also the opportunity to purchase an “add-on” to your Park Pass which gave you access to a special GA zone with separate bathrooms, screens and food trucks. Despite being a clear value add, for some reason, this was scrapped for 2023 and 2024. Like, that’s one reason I would happily give you extra money…but you’re just wanting me to pay more now for nothing?

AusGP Access

Earlier, I mentioned paying for access to pre-sale, which brings us to the controversial “Aus GP Access” program.

This program began as a bizarre crypto-adjacent experiment where fans could buy “tokens” which gave them access to bonus experiences. Initially, despite the weird token process that could have been a lot more straightforward, there was some actual value to the program. Tokens started at $55 and gave pre-sale access and reserved zones at Melbourne Walk and the Fan Forum for fans to get closer to the drivers. But because fan experience seems to be a foreign concept for the Aus Grand Prix Corporation, they raised the prices to $200 and got rid of the reserved zones. So basically, your $200 got you pre-sale access and the chance to bid on experiences such as pit walks. You don’t need to be an expert to see that this is poor value for money.

Of course, because fans know the tickets are a nightmare to try and get during the public sales, the $200 passes sell out year after year, which gives the corporation false assurance of the “value” of their product, rather than an understanding of what it really shows: their entire ticketing system is broken.

Dynamic Disasters

And speaking of broken ticket systems and poor value for money, here’s where things get even messier: we’re now throwing dynamic pricing into the mix for all ticket types.

Dynamic pricing has been used in recent years for grandstand tickets, but I’m a solid 98.5% sure it’s the first year it’s been turned on for Park Passes. That, or I and everyone I know have just gotten extremely lucky. But regardless, it’s here for 2025.

Look. Dynamic pricing never makes sense and should never be used, but I can sort of see the logic in putting it on certain grandstands. After all, there are a limited number of seats and some seats are more popular than others, especially at a race track. There is zero logic, however, in applying it to general admission tickets, especially when you’re not providing an upper limit to your fans.

Dynamic pricing works by increasing ticket costs during periods of high demand. You know when a period of high demand is? When tickets go on sale. So there’s basically a 100% chance fans will log in and immediately see tickets at surged prices and not know how much the announced $309 ticket is going to actually cost them until they make it through the queue.

I’m lucky. I have a well-paying job and disposable income, and even if I’m buying multiple tickets, I know I’ll have enough money to buy them even if they’re surging. But a lot of fans aren’t that lucky, and that kind of uncertainty and huge increases in cost is really just the organisation laughing in the face of their customers.

The AusGP Access presale launched this week, and we immediately saw the “in-demand” pricing in action. Grandstand tickets that were listed on the website as $625 were selling at $1299.80 (108% increase) and those listed for $485 were selling at $749.80 (54.6% increase). And remember, fans accessing this presale had already shelled out $200 for the honour of getting in early!

Yes, fans are paying these prices, but there’s zero logic as to why they’ve chosen to go with this model other than the fact they care more about money than what it means for their fans.

Silverstone has found themselves in hot water in recent years over their decision to use dynamic pricing, and while they still applied it for their 2025 sale, they at least published the ranges that each ticket could fall into. No such kindness from the Aus Grand Prix!

Supply and Demand (the ballot question)

The thing about popular events is that they’re always going to be driven by the very basic concept of supply and demand. When there are more people than tickets, fans are always going to be frustrated by the experience and the potential of missing out. You’re never going to make everyone happy because inevitably someone is going to walk away either without the tickets they want, or without tickets all together.

As someone who wrote an entire PhD on the commodification of fandom spaces, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the different structures that can be put into place to try and keep fans happy. Solutions suggested often include:

• Prioritising past customers

• Prioritising customers based on level of spend

• Prioritising customers based on some perceived “loyalty” metric (e.g. in the music industry, focusing on streaming minutes, etc.)

• Prioritising fan club members

• Randomised ballots

The last two on this list are the most equitable, but as we see every year when Melbourne announces their ballot system, they’re also controversial because they don’t reward any kind of past engagement.

Which brings us to the ultimate question:

How should you reward “loyalty”?

Loyalty is a tricky word in fan engagement as it means different things to different people. To many fans, it’s something that can’t be measured by any marketing metric. It’s the intangibles of time, of passion, of love. Of course, organisations love data, so they’re more likely to view it in dollars spent and well…just dollars spent. If you purchase an expensive ticket, and especially if you purchase an expensive ticket year after year, surely that makes you their most loyal customer!

However, as my PhD explored, it really doesn’t. It makes you a customer who has money and opportunity, and that's fine! But it doesn’t mean you should necessarily get any kind of priority over a fan who for whatever reason hasn’t been able to participate in that way. And that’s where the random ballot is effective.

I think Melbourne could introduce one additional pre-sale for fans who had tickets the previous year, even if that takes the form of a smaller ballot. It would serve the purpose of “rewarding” prior attendance while still keeping the door open for newer fans, or fans whose financial situation has changed, or whose life situation has changed (e.g. they’ve moved closer to the event, they’ve finished school and have more control over their own activities, their kids are now older and can be left for a weekend, etc. etc. etc.).

But the number one rule when it comes to fan loyalty and engagement should be never, ever take advantage of your fans through something like dynamic pricing. Rather than rewarding, this is punishment.

Conclusion

People often blame Ticketmaster for dynamic pricing, and while it is their model and they are overall a pretty evil company, we need to remember that it is the individual event and organisers that choose to turn dynamic pricing on. The Australian Grand Prix Corporation could have been content with just their annual ticket price hike, and look, I’ll even let them keep the $200 pre-sale access. But dynamic pricing? That’s not something we should let them get away with.

Ultimately, the only effective way to change an action is to protest it by not participating…but it’s in that point that the organisers have us in a chokehold because we all still want to go and see our favourite drivers and have a fun weekend with friends. This knowledge allows them to continue to take advantage of their fans because there will always be fans (myself included!) who begrudgingly make the purchase despite being mad enough to write 2,300 words about the broken system.

But we can be angry. We can be loud. Clearly, if we’re me, we can write newsletters and social media posts and speak as experts in the media about why ticketing and the fan experience need an overhaul. The fact that something is popular shouldn’t mean that fans are forced to pay double a listed price because an organisation feels like increasing a profit margin.

Sport and entertainment could not exist without fans, and organisations like the Australian Grand Prix need to remember that long after the DTS hype has faded and the desperate rush for tickets has begun to ebb, fans will remember these strategies and the way it permanently sours their opinion of the event and the organisers. Maybe everyone wants to see Lewis’ first race in Ferrari in 2025, but one day, it’s going to be a harder sell, and fans will remember how they were treated.