Last night, UK PonyCon gave us all some ticket news. Tickets are not yet available, but we now know that you will be able to buy them from 8pm BST on Saturday 29th April. The tickets page is also now active, though again you can't actually buy any for another couple of weeks.
Tickets will be available in the same tiers as last year: Standard, Bronze, Silver and Gold. The first two will only be limited by venue capacity, but there will be just 60 Silver and a mere four Gold tickets available. Last year I believe every one of them went before long, so the demand was clearly there! Now, on to the prices. I'll stick to Adult Weekend rates to make things simpler, but one-day and child/family tickets are also on offer. No booking fees on UKPC tickets, remember!
Standard: £52 (+13% on 2022¹) – this is yer basic weekend entry ticket. It gets you a badge with basic lanyard, con book, admission to the Saturday night concert and – if you book by 1st August – a nice personalised con badge.
¹ Only fair to note that ticket prices were held at 2021 levels last year.
Bronze: £81 (+25%) – this is what I had last year. You get a nicer lanyard and badge, your name in the con book, a button badge and a £5 donation to generally awesome long-time con charity the RDA.
Silver: £150 (+25%) – the big bump up to Silver also gives you a number of exclusive (to Silver/Gold sponsors) extra goodies: a Sponsor T-shirt, tote bag, art print and mug, as well as a couple of autograph/photo tokens. RDA donation is £10.
Gold: £400 (+8%) – if you're lucky enough to get the top-line ticket, you get four tokens and also everything the Silver folks get... and a Sewpoke Britannia plushie, and a hoodie, and a ticket to an as-yet-unspecified "Afternoon Tea", which I'd guess would be a "chat with VIPs" thing.¹ RDA donation is £20.
¹ We don't yet know who these might be, but you don't have autograph tokens unless there's someone... ;)
So... thoughts? Well, I can't really ignore the price rises. I don't doubt for a moment that these are the lowest figures that UKPC could realistically charge and still run the convention properly. Their costs keep rising as is often pointed out. But however justified and inevitable it is, a 25% rise for the middle two tiers is big, well above inflation – and it will make it tough for some. Bear in mind attendees' surrounding costs (hotels, eating out, travel etc) have also risen – sometimes sharply – in the last year.
Am I going to go? I honestly don't know. You only have to look back at the "uk ponycon" tag over the years to see how much affection I have for this convention, but. For reasons that are not relevant to this blog or MLP, I have some pretty chunky costs to address this year that I didn't have in 2022. I'm also thinking that next year is the 20th anniversary of UKPC. If I end up having to choose between this year and next, then to be honest it's probably going to be 2024.
I want to be completely clear here. I think UK PonyCon is very good, I think it's very well run, I think it deserves to be very successful. That applies whether I personally make it this time or not. But I'm not here to be an ad for any event, I'm here to serve my readers, so I have to be straightforward and honest. Mind you, they had Andrea Libman last year. Actual Fluttershy. I'm not sure what, for me, could possibly top that! :P
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