Following is the full statement that Tennessee Titans Interim President Steve Underwood provided to NewsChannel 5 Investigates in responses to questions raised by a former ticket office employee:
Our PSL contracts and accounts are premised on annual renewal. In order to maintain the account, the PSL holder buys the tickets in the account for each season. This is what the Holders who purchased accounts agreed to do annually: renew by payment or forfeit the PSLs.
The bulk of our existing accounts elect to renew each year and do so timely. Every year, we work with a small percentage of our customers who have financial or other issues with renewal (e.g., a divorce or the death of the account holder). Our service personnel are trained to find ways to accommodate our loyal customers. For example, we aggressively seek to help customers reinstate PSL accounts. We do so once without penalty as a matter of policy. If the PSL is sold to another customer after it has been forfeited, the option is, of course, not available to us or to the former PSL holder.
We would prefer to help in instances where we can rather than lose the customer and have the customer lose their PSL. On occasion, and in furtherance of this policy, we have allowed a customer to renew and reinstate even after an account has been forfeited, but only if the forfeited PSLs have not already been sold to another customer. This is the risk that all forfeited accounts run. The example your inquiry mentions is extreme, and the account was at risk the entire time it had not been reinstated. Our choice in these circumstances is to force a long time customer to pay another PSL fee or work with them to reinstate their old account. Working something out seems more reasonable to us than the financial gouging your source apparently suggests.
As to our policy regarding seat location upgrades for PSL holders:
Over time, we have upgraded the locations of thousands of PSL seats as an accommodation to our PSL holders. While we do not guarantee we can always do so, we always try. We have attempted to make this as easy as possible, including offering our PSL holders the ability to do so on line.
Your inquiry is actually different than your uninformed source realizes or understands.
Our organization holds a number of seats off the PSL market and has done so since our initial negotiations for the relocation. These are usually our own house tickets that have never been associated with or sold with a PSL. These seats are held for our own needs and always have been. We accommodate our own employees, players, sponsors, partners, and others from these allotments. They are our own tickets. If we have no need for some of them for a particular game we sell them just like any other single game ticket. Our house accounts are in locations throughout the building.
Sale of these house account tickets to or through a broker is and would have been a violation of our policies. We have no reason to know or believe there were violations of these policies with regard to our house accounts. These are tickets set aside to accommodate our own internal sales needs for employees, sponsors, players and coaches. Our executives are working during games, so the idea that these tickets are "reserved for upper management" would of course be false. If any of our employees were to need additional tickets we would address their requests from our own house accounts.
House accounts are held by every professional and college sports and entertainment organization and box office and all of them keep this inventory for the same reasons we do. It is common and anyone with much experience in ticketing knows and understands this, Your source is unfortunately ill-informed or is lying or both. If I read your email correctly, one of your sources has provided you with our private business information and documents, which we did not give him permission to take or keep. We feel sure that you will return this stolen property to us promptly.
This is always a concern with unreliable and undisclosed sources. They weaken and all of us and do untold damage to the cause of journalism through rumor and innuendo and misinformation. This in turn, disaffects all of us.
We regret you have been, in these instances, misinformed and we are pleased to correct the record.
