After students complained about difficulties in reserving tickets for Feb Club, the Undergraduate Assembly proposed increasing the Feb Club budget next year to make more events free and increase the number of available tickets per event.
Feb Club features events for seniors throughout the month of February organized by the senior class board every year. During the first week of Feb Club this year, many seniors who logged on to reserve tickets on Ticketleap found themselves locked out due to high traffic, College senior Naeche Vincent said.
Even after Class Board changed the ticket-buying platform to Eventbrite after the first week, Vincent said students still found it difficult to get tickets for popular events due to limited tickets and high demand.
The Class Board requested increasing the $75,000 Feb Club budget by approximately $30,000 at the Feb. 16 UA meeting for 2021. The UA, however, voted down the request and instead passed an amendment to reallocate $5,500 from the Skimmerfest budget to the Feb Club non-alcoholic programming budget.
Feb Club includes a trip to Atlantic City, a Philadelphia 76ers game, and snow tubing, among other events. Tickets are available on a first-come, first-serve basis, 2020 Class President and Engineering and Wharton senior Karim El Sewedy said.
Vincent said when she and seven of her friends logged on to Ticketleap to get tickets to the Feb. 7 76ers game, the website told her that they were sold out despite being opened for only a couple of minutes. Class Board later notified students that the website crashed from high traffic and reopened 20 minutes later, Vincent said. She added that she was unable to get a ticket because she had an exam when the website reopened.
Although the switch to Eventbrite after the first week fixed the website crashes, El Sewedy said some students still could not get tickets due to the limited number of tickets and high demand.
“There's a lot of demand for events and tickets end up selling out terribly fast, but capacity, most of the time, is constrained by the capacity of the venue we’re working with,” El Sewedy said.
El Sewedy said that by increasing the budget, Class Board hopes to make more events free for students. While 21 out of 30 events are free, El Sewedy said, other events such as the 76ers game, a trip to Atlantic City, and the gala at the Philadelphia Museum of Art require students to pay.
Wharton and College senior and UA representative Maria Curry added that Class Board had increased the ticket price for some events after an early round of ticket sales. Curry said she paid approximately $10 for an event at Concourse but knew people who paid $30 because they bought tickets later.
El Sewedy added that a larger budget would allow Class Board to host events at venues with a larger capacity to accommodate higher demand.
“The current allocation is simply insufficient,” El Sewedy said.
The current $75,000 Feb Club budget consists of $40,000 from P sweater and other apparel sales and $28,000 from the Class Board budget allocated by the UA, UA Treasurer and College junior Kevin Zhou said.
Curry added that the current 2020-2021 budget proposal did not reflect the initial approximately $30,000 request or the later amendment, because 2020 Class Board officers missed the deadline to submit changes to their proposed budget before the Feb. 9 UA meeting.
“In general [$30,000] is a large amount to do at one time, given constraints of the budget, but I think that it’s reasonable that the senior class board gets an increase, specifically for the purpose of making Feb Club less expensive,” Curry said.
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