The New Jersey Devils recently disclosed to season ticket members a new electronic ticket delivery system. Thus far, the response to this emerging technology can best be described as lukewarm.

Sources from the New Jersey Devils Client Experience Team today confirmed to me that the season ticketing distribution and entry procedures will be significantly altered for the 2016-17 season.

The crux of the change is the distribution of a credit-card like entry card, I believe named a Cricket Card, which will be used for entry into games. One card will be issued per seat. This will replace as the default ticket method the beloved, by many, commemorative ticket stock.

New Mobile Centric Ticketing Technology At The Rock

For Season Ticket Members who desire printed tickets, this traditional option is still available, but there is a $25 payment required to receive printed tickets. Printed tickets of this nature will not be commemorative tickets, they will be boilerplate ducats delivered on the standard green and white Prudential Center ticket office stock. In other words, fairly boring, unattractive, but functional tickets.

Some of the other ticket policy changes are:

Tickets can no longer be printed as PDF files from the Devils app (e.g. no more PDF tickets, meaning it is considerably harder to sell tickets on third party sites such as StubHub and tickets can no longer be emailed to friends).

Tickets can be transferred using the Devils App on the computer or a mobile device via Ticketmaster. This transfer will be in a format (QR Code) which can be used for mobile entry into Prudential Center.

To the best of my knowledge, printed PDF tickets will be a thing of the past.

What does this mean to season ticket holders?

The jury is still out on the Devils’ electronic card entry system for 2016-17

Well, if you attend games at the Rock with the same person all the time, not much changes for you. Just use your credit-card like device to enter the games. Not a major issue.

If you like to distribute tickets to friends or business contacts, well, that will be harder and less than ideal. One needs to pay a $25 fee for the printed tickets, which will be, to be candid, staid and not the most visually appealing item to distribute to clients and customers. The Devils may not realize this, but attractive tickets with pictures of players which fans can display in memorabilia displays, get signed or the like, are treasured far more than the team seems to realize.

And for those who like to sell on StubHub, I think the impact is obvious. Happily for me, that’s not an issue, but based on the comments of different fans on the various message boards, fan groups and the like which I read today, it’s a major talking point for some of the Devils’ most passionate fans.

I hope the Devils know what they are doing here. The Yankees did something similar, which was wildly unpopular and received a lot of bad press. As we all know, the Devils are not the Yankees when it comes to the sheer numbers of their fan base.

While we all get that the secondary ticket market is a threat to the business model of a sports team, alienating your most loyal customers isn’t one of the best practices I learned up the road at the Graduate School of Management at Rutgers. It should be interesting to see how this all plays out, to say the least.