Dynamic ticket pricing taking root in Japan amid pandemic

Amusement parks, baseball clubs and other entertainment businesses in Japan are increasingly adopting dynamic ticket pricing in a bid to avoid creating crowds amid the COVID-19 pandemic while stabilizing revenue. Those businesses hope that dynamic pricing will help bring in more customers as tickets are cheap on days with low demand. The ticket sales market in Japan in the year ended in February 2021 shrank to a quarter of that of before the pandemic, according to Pia Research Institute, an arm of ticketing agency Pia Corp. Meanwhile, the total value of dynamically priced tickets sold in the country is expected to grow by 1.5-fold to around ¥6.2 billion in the year ending this month from the previous year, according to Dynamic Plus Co., a Mitsui & Co. unit that uses artificial intelligence to offer dynamic pricing services. Under a dynamic pricing plan, prices are changed depending on demand until the day of the event.