C3 Seating Company – contracted by the government to provide bleacher, ticketing and marshalling services for the parades – presented reconciled reports to the Ministry of Finance Tuesday outlining bleacher ticket sales from the Junior Junkanoo and Boxing Day Parades of 2003 and the New Year’s Day 2004 festival.
Speaking with members of the press in Rawson Square at the same time that other company officials made the presentation at the Ministry of Finance, C3 Public Relations Director Peter Adderley said the company earned $689,090 from bleacher seats sold for the three parades.
He reported that spectators purchased 74 percent of available seats for the Junior Junkanoo parade – generating $54,740. Ticket sales peaked for the Boxing Day Parade, totaling $392,659 with 98 percent of the available seats being sold.
Mr. Adderley said the company earned $241,691 from tickets sold for the New Year’s Day parade. He pointed out that 71 percent of the available seats were sold for that event.
For the three parades, 19,576 of the available 23,990 seats were sold.
Noting that the figures reported were gross ticket sales and did not factor in any of the company’s expenses, Mr. Adderley said the company would likely not earn significant profits for some years.
“We expected that it would be in the long term before the company would earn significant profits,” he said, “and that is why we made the proposal for a five-year deal with the clear understanding now that the deal would be revisited after its second year.”
According to Mr. Adderley, C3 will present a cheque for 10 percent of the final revenue amount to the government “immediately” after a certified audit is completed.
While company officials were pleased with the organisation’s performance in its first series of parades, Mr. Adderley said, company officials learnt a number of lessons that they would apply in subsequent parades to help improve operations.
“We’ve been able to look at each parade with a critical eye and we’ve been able to improve as we went ahead,” Mr. Adderley said.
“There’s no question that the New Year’s Day parade was the more organised parade relative to seating, but there’s no doubt that as we promised we [gave] the public a first class product,” he added.
The public relations director acknowledged, however, that the company was plagued by several operational miscues, which it will have to address in the future.
He pointed out that chief among the problems experienced by bleacher patrons was the confusion surrounding access to their seats.
Mr. Adderley added that “[the company] can do better relative to entry points and we want to put out [information about those access points] very early for future parades so that people would not have to be turned around.”
Addressing concerns that disassembled bleachers remained in Rawson Square up to Tuesday afternoon, 12 days after the final parade, Mr. Adderley placed the blame on the Bahamas Electricity Corporation.
“Our priority was to have the bleachers that were an obstacle to the doors of businesses and parking areas, particularly to the public service drivers, removed,” he said.
“We had a day’s delay in removing the other bleachers due to the fact that we had our workers working during the night hours,” Mr. Adderley said. “Once BEC removed the additional lights, which were used for persons to view the parade, all of the lights went out so we were restrained to only the day periods.”
Darrin Culmer, The Bahama Journal
