Tickets sold vs. attendance

[dereksbicycles]

One friend of mine was asking me about Valentine Day Dance that I recently attended. I had no idea of how many tickets were sold vs real attendance. I had heard that close to 80 tickets were sold, but only 50 or so people came.

My friend had mentioned that it looks bad for organization. Think of how much food are wasted because of # of no shows. I don't see it as being a bad thing. People make "donation" if they don't go to the dance. If anything, it means more food for those that did come. More leftovers to bring home.

Obviously, it may hurt because raffle tickets and tickets for games at the events cannot be purchased if people don't come. Still, I would think that organization would be happy to sell so many tickets.

What do you think??

I'm interested in how you see this from a business point of view.

[Wozcreative]

Anyone that holds a party of some kind needs to account for a % of people that may not come.
This also depends on the type of party, the date, what's involved with people going etc.

In this case, because it is a Valentine's party.. I would assume that there might be a greater number of people not going because:

A) They may be "newly" single all of a sudden — breakups happen the most just before christmas and valentines day.
B) Bad weather
C) Tickets were sold too far in advance (and people forgot about it)
D) Flu season (I had a party on the weekend where I had about 14 people come out of 21... most were sick and a few double booked)

As an organizer you need to budget and take all that into consideration.

[Harold Mansfield]

When you hold any event, there are no guarantees. It's a crap shoot really. At least tickets were sold.
I know there's insurance that you can buy against things like natural disasters, bad weather and all kinds of things that can ruin attendance at an event.
Concert and club promoters do this all of the time.

[craigmandco]

Hosting a party in general is tricky business - risk. You can lose money preparing properly or not. Everything Wozcreative said is so true. My question is how much were the tickets? This is the only way to see if it was a loss or not.