NCAA Final Four tickets via Capital One Experiences for 50K miles each

If you were looking to attend the Men’s NCAA Final Four in New Orleans next weekend or the Women’s NCAA Final Four in Minneapolis, Capital One Entertainment has a seat for you (for as long as this lasts): they are offering tickets to the men’s event starting from 50K per person (minimum of two tickets required) or to the women’s event starting from 25K per person to both the national semifinal and national final. A VIP package for the men’s event includes a back of house tour and a 4-night stay at the Ritz-Carlton New Orleans, though that package is exorbitantly expensive at 625K miles per person. Unfortunately, very high service fees make many of the experiences poor values.

Direct link to Capital One Entertainment to log in and browse

Capital One Entertainment is Capital One’s new entertainment booking portal, which offers the ability to purchase tickets (or redeem Capital One miles for tickets) to a vast array of experiences. In most vases, redemption values are poor: you’ll generally get less than 1c per mile when redeeming your Capital One miles for experiences tickets.

Still, they do have some cool stuff. The men’s Final Four packages start at 50K miles per person and go up to 625,000 miles per person for the VIP package. The women’s final four packages, both the Venture X package and Lower Bowl package, are even more reasonable at 25K miles per person (and the VIP package for the women’s event is just 100K miles per person, though no hotel stay is included).

Tim noted that in a couple of his searches, Capital One seemed to have wider availability and better prices than other options for booking tickets to the same events. On the other hand, in my first few searches, I encountered a number of instances where Capital One wouldn’t have been the cheapest option (though I do admit that they seem to have an impressive amount of availability).

Using miles for tickets was not a particularly good value, yielding just 0.8c per mile in value. The good news I suppose is that you can use miles to offset any amount of the charge, including the additional service fees, but the bad news is that you get the same 0.8c per mile in value. Worse, the service fees are obscenely high.

I first looked at a ~$45 ticket to a New York Knicks game and the total taxes and fees came to about $15. I figured that was probably an unfair example proportionally-speaking since any kind of service fees will add a lot to the cost of an already-cheap nosebleed seat to a team that’s got no shot of making the playoffs.

But then I looked up tickets to a performance of Wicked in New York. While the search results showed a price of $153 per ticket for orchestra seats, the total came to $202.68 per ticket — service and delivery fees added a whopping $49.68 — that’s 32% on top of the ticket price.

I’m not surprised to see that. Back when Capital One offered 10x on VividSeats for a while and when there were some ticket-related Amex Offers, I had hunted out tickets to Hamilton and some other things and I frequently found that VividSeats pricing looked terrific until I got to the final page of checkout and saw the fees.

Still, for special event stuff / Capital One cardholder specials like the Final Four tickets, it could be worth keeping an eye on this stuff. Tim noted tickets available to a few events that were otherwise sold out, so it’s probably worth a look if you have an event in your area of particular interest since it may be your best shot at scoring seats. Just prepare yourself to pay a lot more than the search results suggest.

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