THE IRFU yesterday announced fundamental changes to their ticket pricing structures for home internationals.

In an attempt to avoid the disastrous consequences of their 21 per cent price increase last November, the union are following the advice of Deloitte Sport UK, whom they employed to seek a strategy to ensure full houses in 2012.

There is also an acceptance of the need to reduce the price from last season’s home Six Nations games against England and France. This means decreases ranging from 18 to 33 per cent have been introduced for the visits of Wales on February 5th, Italy on February 25th and Scotland on March 10th.

“We are not immune to the economic situation that the country and the world finds itself in,” said Pádraig Power, the IRFU commercial and marketing director. “We need to ensure the team plays in front of full houses for our commercial partners and our TV partners.

“Full theatres of sport are much more dramatic and beneficial for everybody. We need to balance that with price to create the revenue streams we need to keep the development of players coming through and keep the systems and structures at the top level working.”

There is, however, a catch.

The provinces’ allocations of tickets for the more attractive 2013 home fixtures against England and France will be dependent on how many tickets their clubs sell for the lowest take up matches this season. This, despite a sizeable drop in prices, is still likely to be the Italian match.

Also, the provinces must bank the cash from ticket sales six weeks in advance of the first match against Wales and five weeks before the other two fixtures.

“The IRFU have only four customers,” Power explained. “(Payment from ticket sales is needed) six weeks before the Welsh game, so we have a week of the Christmas market, and five weeks before the other two so we have time to sell any remaining tickets to the general public through our supporters club.

“We just want to ensure we get tickets to people who want them and not have them clogged up in the system. We won’t sell a single ticket until those deadlines have passed so the clubs have time to get tickets to their members.”

Of the Aviva Stadium’s 51,700 capacity, approximately 30,000 tickets are made available to the public via clubs, schools and the IRFU supporters club. The rest are pre-sold to 10 year ticket holders and corporate box holders.

Outside of corporate and premium sections of the stadium, tickets are available in four price categories, with another 1,800 held over for schoolboys/girls (see panel for price range).

There are 13,000 seats in category one, 4,500 in category two, 5,000 in category three and 2,500 in category four.

The union have also finally accepted the stadium was constructed with over 200 seats that have restricted viewing. Some are bad, some are not so bad but all of these seats have been reduced to half price.

“Restricted views in the Aviva is a ruthless definition in the sense that (there may only be) a tiny bit of an arm rest in your way,” said Power. “It’s not like restricted views in the old days where there was a huge big pillar and you had to sit out of your seat. The beauty is that any seat in any category that has any kind of restricted view is 50 per cent discounted.”

There is also a new family pack offer that caters for one adult and one child. “After last November we brought in Deloitte Sport UK consultants to look at our ticket prices and distribution with a view to making sure what happened in November never happened again,” said Power.

“The recommendations they came back to us with were that introducing family tickets, the one and one, works. They are saying it is best practice elsewhere, particularly from a health and safety point of view in terms of one-to-one supervision.”

This year’s Six Nations matches against England and France were priced between €50 and €90 across the four categories.

In 2012 the opening game against Wales is the most expensive, with adult tickets ranging in price from €20 for a category four restricted view seat to €105 for premium level. The price range for the Scottish fixture is €17.50 (restricted view) to €90 and the Italy game starts at €15 (restricted view) up to €75 for a premium seat.