AFC Bournemouth's general manager and supporter liaison officer Liz Finney is on hand to give a February round-up of fan matters at Vitality Stadium.

TICKETING

Away ticket allocation

There is no exact science in deciding the allocation of tickets to take for our away fixtures in the Premier League. We look at aspects including the timing of the game, distance, what numbers we took last time to the fixture and how our away support has looked recently.

However, it is often really tricky, especially when you add into the mix the options offered by the away club. The rules say that the first block is sale or return and thereafter it is sale only, i.e. If you don't sell the tickets the club still has to pay for them. Some clubs offer only two blocks to make up the 3,000 seats while others have a range of options and some are flexible while others will apply the rule stringently.

For example, with our recent visit to West Ham we took the initial allocation of tickets on the basis that they said we could ask for more if needed. While we had five days of general sale for this game, when we went back to West Ham to check if these additional tickets would be on a sale or return or sale only basis, we were informed that they had been sold already.

There were some supporters therefore who were unable to purchase for this game although we kept a list of those who had contacted the club - a total of 15 - and we were, through returns, able to allocate tickets to all of these fans. My understanding is that West Ham can only sell a set number of seats at their ground and therefore they had used the remaining away allocation to facilitate more home seat sales. In effect this meant that there were empty seats in the visiting supporters section but they were not actually available for use for our game at the Olympic Stadium.

For the Crystal Palace game we went for the full allocation of 3,000 tickets but issued only 2,170 and were left with seats for which we had to pay.

We will continue to work hard to get the allocation for away tickets that works best for everyone.

Selling on of Tickets

This season has seen a rise in the incidences of tickets being sold on. This causes the potential for safety issues where the recipient has been an away supporter or is flouting the Cherries priority points system.

Fortunately, it seems Cherries fans are as unhappy as us about this and you have been great at reporting incidents. Where this is proven, we will put a stop on the sellers' accounts to prevent them buying any further tickets for a set period. This policy has been implemented in two recent cases with over two months of games missed as a result. We will in addition carry out spot checks at games to match tickets to the holder and we would like supporters to continue to let us know where there is any misuse of tickets. 

A list of ticketing FAQs can be found here.

Supporter Meetings

We had a great disability focus group meeting on Thursday night chaired by Alice Jeans, our disability liaison and access officer. The turnout was 29 which considering it was really horrible weather was hugely encouraging. Topics discussed ranged from accessible away travel to dealing with autistic supporters to the club’s matchday ban procedure. Notes of actions from the meeting will be published by Alice once approved by all attendees.

We have a second Women at Football meeting planned for February and we will publish the date once this is confirmed, so watch this space.

And finally…

We had our first Equality Partnerships Group Meeting on 18th January where we will work with various local organisations who represent the diversity of our community. Senior representatives of Dorset Race Council, Diverse Abilities, Bourne Free/Proud Cherries, Care South, Dorset Mental Health Forum and Bournemouth University and Kick It Out. The group will work with the club to share their skills and experience of working with people from our local community, and apply them to improving the accessibility of everything we do as a club so that we are as inclusive and diverse as we can be.

At the meeting we were able to show a video we had produced around equality and wanted to share this with you, please see below.

As ever, we welcome your feedback or suggestions so please do either email on liz.finney@afcb.co.uk or telephone 0344 756 1910.