How Ticket Wallet is Helping Fans Attend the US Open for Less

The US Open Has a Problem

The US Open is one of our favorite sporting events of the year. It's also notoriously expensive. This year in particular, our data has ticket prices increasing by an average 17% over 2025 prices—despite the top ranked male player in the world, Jannik Sinner, sitting out from this year's American Slam due to injury.

Even the Mayor of New York stepped in to provide 1,000 discounted tickets to local residents, recognizing that US Open prices were far from affordable, and activist investor Bill Ackman complained about “absurd” prices on X.

US Open Prices Are Out of Control

The negative backlash from the US Open pricing is difficult for the USTA, the governing body behind the Open, to combat. The Open is the leading revenue generator for the Association and in a short three weeks it funds most of their operations for the entire year. So they have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize the potential of the tournament. That means offering the signature Honey Deuce drink at $23, keeping other concessions expensive, catering to the wealthiest fans, and—increasingly so—influencers.

Simultaneously, the Association also is responsible for growing the sport in the United States and that means allowing as many young, excited fans onto the grounds as possible. That's the principal reason why ground passes are typically so cheap—they are meant to be the option for the proletariat.

But every year, the Open is becoming more and more popular. And every economist will tell you, as demand increases for fixed supply, prices will go up. While the USTA can attempt to keep face value prices low—like with the ground pass—because demand is so high there's enough incentive for people to buy the presale passes and resell them. This year, resell prices for ground passes have exceeded 2x the face value.

The USTA Struggles to Control Prices

The affordability problem with the Open is clear, the solution is not straightforward. If the USTA keeps face value low, that incentivizes significant resale. Eliminating resale altogether significantly reduces the number of tickets in circulation and is generally disadvantageous for survive-and-advance tournaments like the US Open, where fan favorites like Ben Shelton and Taylor Fritz could fall out after one unfortunate night.

The Purpose of AI Driven Search

In the meantime, while we can't fix the USTA's pricing problem, our team ran a deep dive on fan behavior during expensive, volatile tournaments like the US Open (and the recent FIFA World Cup). We noticed one repeated pattern: for multi-day tournaments like the US Open, fans were constantly scanning across multiple days, times, and matchups trying to find the best value.

But comparing prices across events on most resale platforms is messy because they are optimized to show you one game at a time.

To make things easier, we redesigned our search experience around AI to bring the same level of automation and convenience to buyers that we've spent the last two years providing for our sellers. This move follows a broader pattern across multiple search engines. Consumers are searching more via natural language than direct lookups. Google runs your searches through their AI. Netflix and DoorDash followed suit. Ticket marketplaces should be no different—searching the same way you would text a friend is more convenient.

Now, our AI assistant scans our entire inventory across multiple events in real time and surfaces the best tickets based on price, seat views, and any other requirements you add without you having to click in and out of multiple different events, sections, and listings.

The cheapest tickets to Arthur Ashe? Done.

The best tickets in section 5 at Louis Armstrong? Easy.

Our AI can also break down more complicated questions to help you find niche opportunities. Stadium seat maps allow us to break down relevant sight lines and viewing preferences along with historical data on popular seats. We're even working on providing our AI with access to our proprietary forecasting algorithms to give consumers more insight as to where prices are heading. Our simple philosophy here is that fans should be informed when they're making a decision to purchase—that's why our seatmaps show you price trend data and our AI surfaces its reasoning when providing suggestions.

No buyer fees. Personal customer support. And now your own agent to help you find the best tickets. That's our best offer at helping you get on the grounds for this year's US Open without paying a month's worth of rent.