I spent a recent vacation in the Bay Area and parts north, being a sports fan again. The plan was to go to three baseball games, a soccer game and an afternoon of horse racing during a six-day trip. Before long, five events in six days felt crazy.

So I added a sixth event, a Class A game in San Jose between Dodgers and Giants farm clubs.

Being in the stands again, after a pandemic break, was a familiar pleasure.

But getting there was different.

Many fans who have been getting back in the game this year know the feeling of being plunged into the world of electronic ticketing.

"It's become ubiquitous," Tom Andrus, chief operating officer of the digital ticketing platform AXS, said recently of sports' switch away from paper tickets.

Teams, leagues and other sports promoters call it mobile ticketing, but a better name would be ticketless ticketing.

Attending six events on summer vacation meant using six apps or websites to buy tickets, and keeping a smartphone charged to display the tickets to scanners at the gates.

At a Giants game in San Francisco, I had trouble transferring a ticket to a college friend electronically. He couldn't make it appear on his iPhone screen. And this is no clueless Luddite - he works in Silicon Valley.

At the horse track in Pleasanton, you'd expect to walk up and buy admission. But even in that countrified setting, tickets had to be ordered online. An employee at the turnstile had her teenage son there to show older racegoers how.

At the races, concession stand pizza was supposed to be ordered through an app. Except the app wouldn't take my credit card. Two employees tried but couldn't make it work.

"You know," the man at the pizza counter said after 10 minutes of this, "you could just hand me your credit card."

Let's hope things run smoother Saturday night for the first fans to attend a pro football game in Southern California since 2019.

With few exceptions, people going to the Chargers-Rams preseason game at SoFi Stadium will purchase tickets online and download them into their smartphones, which will be scanned at entry.

"Be sure to get your phone all set up!" Sam Lagana, the Rams' booming public address announcer, told fans attending a recent training camp practice at UC Irvine. "Get your QR codes ready to go, so you can enjoy a spectacular game!"

The NFL has mandated the use of mobile ticketing for all seats in 2021. This means we've seen the last of the perforated ticket stubs that fans saved as mementos. Even PDF printouts are historical relics.

Some worry that the move to mobile will alienate elderly and low-income fans, who are less likely to own smartphones.

As far as that goes, teams say they have ways around the my-dad-doesn't-have-a-smartphone problem, although they don't get specific about what those ways are.

"The first thing you ask someone is, 'Does someone in your group have a smartphone?' And oftentimes the answer is yes," said Dan August, the Rams' vice president for ticketing and strategy. "A handful of people have called and said, 'I bought one ticket, and I don't have a smartphone.' We'll work with that person on an individual ticket to find a solution that will work for them. But it's not something we mass-promote, because we try to help people find the solutions for themselves."

Less is more

This is the first year that virtually every major sports event in the Los Angeles area features virtual tickets, but it's old hat to plenty of fans.

August said 70% of tickets at the Coliseum in 2019, the Rams' last season with fans, were electronic, while Antonio Morici, the Dodgers' senior vice president of ticketing, said mobile ticketing in Major League Baseball started in 2017 and spiked in 2019 as technological improvements made it easier.

Andrus, whose company and ticketing industry leader Ticketmaster share ticketing services for the Lakers, said the first e-ticketing in the NBA was seen more than a decade ago.

Why has it taken over?

The Covid-19 pandemic encouraged the trend, because mobile ticketing reduces hand-to-hand contact between fans and stadium workers, and can permit contact tracing based on seat locations.

Other justifications already existed: Elimination of fraud by scalpers, because E-tickets can't be duplicated or counterfeited. Better security, because teams know who is in the stands. Environmental benefits, with less printing and mailing of tickets. Ease of transferring and reselling tickets, or cancelling sales. The ability for teams to communicate with ticket holders about stadium policies and event changes.

"This was very important for communicating to fans the various protocols that were ever-changing during the first few months of the (2021) season," said the Dodgers' Morici.

But sports industry watchers say those are rationalisations by franchises that, more than anything, want ticket buyers' personal data and contact info to use to sell more stuff.

"In terms of business partners, especially advertisers, sponsors, and others, including merchandisers and concessionaires, teams and leagues want to facilitate more transactions," said David Carter, a sports industry consultant and USC adjunct professor of sports business.

"And they believe they can do that when harvesting more accurate data that they can then use to up-sell fans on other products, while at the same time providing critical insight to business partners so that they can do the same."

Carter added: "It's important to note that older fans may not be as monetisable as younger ones, so any challenges associated with older fan groups' willingness to adapt to and adopt technology may be more than made up for by greater increases in fan engagement among younger audiences."

Means to an end

Brian Hess, executive director of the Sports Fan Coalition advocacy group, is younger (28) but a sceptic about the motivation behind mobile ticketing.

"The cost (for research and development) that it takes to design these apps, with enough security features to make it acceptably safe, they wouldn't do if there wasn't money on the other side," Hess said.

Hess said ease of ticket transferability is vital for fans, and that's a matter of a policy battle between primary and secondary ticket sellers.

Since my sports-watching trip, I've received email pitches from the Giants ("Vote Posey, Vote Yaz, Vote Crawford - make them All-Stars!") and the San Jose Quakes ("Place Your Deposit on Season Tickets"). An annoyance, but one that teams say you can avoid by opting out of marketing messages.

After initial frustration about having to navigate all those apps and websites, I came around. My conversion happened after I wound up with one extra ticket to an A's-Giants game. I phoned the Giants, and in a minute an agent had cancelled my purchase and refunded the price to my credit card. That didn't happen in paper ticket days.

Team executives sound sincere about making a people-pleasing success of their part in the world's move online.

"The Clippers want to be an innovative, forward-thinking team," said Jason Green, the Clippers' chief ticketing officer. "We also know that change can be painful. When we have change that we believe is going to make the fan experience better, we want to do our best to make sure we are educating and providing great service along the way to make that change as seamless as possible for our fans."

Having cleared the first hurdle, I'm ready to buy more ticketless tickets. Maybe a Dodgers or Angels game is next.

What's my password again?

 - TNS