Packer Fan Tours In the News
It’s official: Fans free to make plans
By Andy Nelesen, Green Bay Press-Gazette
Packers’ game schedule throws area into action
All right Titletown, you may now feel free to plan out the rest of your year. The release of the Green Bay Packers’ game schedule on Thursday cleared the way for fans — and those who cater to the fans’ needs — to begin planning their weekends for the last five months of 2006.
“My wife always likes to put it that there’s two seasons — the Packers’ season and offseason,” said Greg Jenss, known to many as Titletown’s No. 1 Clown. A mainstay at all Lambeau Field games, Jenss lives a life controlled by the Packers home games.
“With me being in the Pro Football Hall of Fame as a fan, we have friends all over the NFL,” Jenss said. “Now that we’ve got a set schedule, we know who is going to be coming up (to Green Bay), who’s not going to be coming up. I start making arrangements in the next week or so here — things like who’s coming, the tailgating and all the little details.”
In a town that lives and breathes Green and Gold, knowing which weekends hold home games is crucial information for doing simple things like finding hotel rooms for out-of-town guests or making dinner reservations. For folks planning something major, like a wedding, it can be a huge gamble. Weddings are typically planned far before the spring announcement of the NFL’s match-ups. But the Packers’ schedule remains a factor.
“We will see that we have more weddings going on on a weekend when there’s not a Packers’ (home) game,” said Wade Eggers, director of operations for DuBois Formalwear. “It does affect people somewhat … especially if they have relatives coming to town.’
Thursday’s schedule announcement was like the crack of a starter pistol for those who make money from the Packers tourism machine. For people who work for Dennis Garrity at Packer Fan Tours and EventUSA, the schedule announcement marks the start of their sales season.
“We contact our hotels and tell them the dates, we get our room blocks lined up for both home and road games,” said Garrity. “We of course start to buy tickets and determine what our pricing is. We couldn’t really do that until today. We knew the opponents, but we didn’t know which package got which games and more importantly, we didn’t know the dates.”
Garrity’s crew is not starting from scratch, but there is plenty of work to do in the first few hours. It was only a matter of minutes after the 1 p.m. announcement that the phone started ringing with folks looking to buy and sell tickets.
“Our design department kicks into gear, our printing department kicks into gear, our tour department, our sales department, our strategic department, the people who determine pricing all swing into motion,” Garrity said. “We’re a pretty well-oiled machine here. We all know what we have to do. We just kind of wait for the schedule to hit and boom, we snap into action.”
Even with all the planning and templates: “Today is very, very hectic,” Garrity said Thursday afternoon.
Carrie Calaway, revenue manager at the Radisson Hotel & Conference Center in Ashwaubenon, had a video crew from the NFL Network in her office about 1 p.m. Thursday.
“I looked over and said, ‘The schedule came out,’ and I just pointed to the phones,” she said. “It’s showtime.”
A crew of managers helps augment the hotel’s normal sales staff during the first few days the schedule is out. The hotel fielded about 400 calls in the first few hours the schedule was public on Thursday.
“Sometimes there’s not enough phones to take the calls,” Calaway said. “It’s fun. It’s my favorite time of year.”
The Packers bye week — set for Oct. 15 this year — also can play a role into how people fill out their plans for the fall.
“The bye week is probably going to end up being one of those middle of October days when I end up raking leaves and taking care of the yard,” Jenss said. “My wife will have me avoiding the television at all costs.”
Source: PackersNews.com