(12-22-2019 12:50 PM)OsageJ Wrote: A question to fans at the game. Was it a pretty good place to watch a football game? To be honest I don't know the dimensions of a soccer field so I don't know if a football field is further from the stands. It was kind of hard to tell on TV. It did look like a nice small stadium.
I was in Section 134 which had a great view of the field. You don't want to be in the lower section as you will have a lot of difficulty seeing the action on the field. Soccer sightlines down low are not good for football games. The bowl also flipped the seating arrangements from what they initially told our ticket office and caused some issues with our seating allocations, so that turned some people off of buying from the school. The bowl also issued some tickets to people for rows that didn't exist, which is not a good look. Some people blamed the school but all tickets were issued from the Cure Bowl Ticketmaster, so that shouldn't have been possible. I have a feeling the attendance numbers may have been affected by some of these issues but we'll never know.
I didn't really like how events were spread out. With the team hotel being on a Universal property, it made it difficult for people not willing to spend $350 a night to stay in the team hotel have a bit more difficulty to attend the events prior to game day. Then yesterday, there was an event at Camping World Stadium with a walk over to Exploria which spread out tailgating/pregaming. Luckily the lots near Exploria were not too bad to get in and out of.
They have some kinks to work out with the game itself. Their normal stadium policy is to only open an hour before game time. That led to a logjam at the gates and no real ordered lines for entry on the side of the stadium with the Fan Fest right outside the gates. Hopefully in the future they open the gates earlier.
To add to the crowd issue, ingress was pretty disjointed as we had to walk through a metal detector and get wanded afterward...and only one person at a time was let through. The clear bags were overly inspected defeating the purpose of a clear bag. Also there seemed to be issues with the e-ticket scanners. Some people weren't even scanning their tickets as machines appeared to be broken and staff at some spots seemed to struggle with how they were supposed to work.
Merchandise...all they had was hats and shirts. No commemorative items (coins/patches/footballs/etc) for purchase for the bowl. You don't even get a ticket to keep as a souvenir since the facility is e-ticket only. They were handing out these cool soccer style scarfs (nice touch since we were playing in a soccer stadium) but they were only giving them out at one gate that I could see. I let everyone know to rush over there to get one before they ran out. This is the first bowl I've come home from with only one souvenir type item. That made me kind of sad.
From all indications so far, the premium seating wasn't worth it. They ran out of beer in the first quarter and the food was cold. Also heard reports of staff not using gloves while handling food (unsure of this so take it with a grain of salt). Overall they didn't seem prepared for the volume of people. Also concessions were kind of ridiculous....$5 for a 20 oz bottle of Coke. Paying pro sports dollars for concessions apparently.
Orlando downtown area was cool and we took over the Wall Street Plaza area Friday night. That part of it was cool, but it'll be much better when all the road construction in that area is done. Rough area to the south and west, but staying to the stadium and downtown areas it wasn't bad at all.
It has potential but there needs to be some reworking of some things. Hopefully things improve for next year and it's even better.