Many shows don’t take credit cards, just checks, so it is in fact a “convenience” if they let you use a card and I’m not surprised management doesn’t want to absorb that cost. Of the shows I’ve been to that take cards, only Tryon doesn’t charge you the 3%, and they are obviously not a smaller local operation!
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The prices don’t seem that high, but what is weird is the mandatory fees on a non-rated show and that they aren’t allowing haul ins. Even really prestigious rated horse shows allow haul ins.
Are you sure they don’t allow them? Usually there’s a haul in fee.
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Actually, our local show venue stopped allowing haul-ins a couple of years ago and requires everyone to pay for a stall, even for unrated schooling shows. I live 10 minutes away, and really preferred hauling-in daily so my horses could be turned out overnight back at home. It’s annoying that they changed this rule.
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The rule does not say you can’t take your horse home every night.
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Yeah, like @trubandloki said, the fact that you have to have a stall does not mean that you can’t take your horse home at night. I have done that before at a show venue in the same town where I used to live. The horses all went home at night to be turned out, then brought back in to the showgrounds in the morning.
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It’s about average IMO for a schooling H/J show. I pay about 400 in rated before I even step foot in the ring.
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Right…but if I’m spending a couple of hundred for a stall I’m going to use it 
That wasn’t really my point so much as the fact that they stopped allowing haul-ins, as did some schooling show venues in the area so it’s not all that uncommon.
That’s true, you can just take them home at night. But showing is expensive enough as it is, do we really need to make it more difficult for people who already are budgeting as it is? Just seems like a strange thing to force people to pay for when quite a few don’t want it.
The whole point of a schooling show means that most of the people will be local. So they won’t need stalls, because they can just go home.
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Exactly. IIRC, for a weekend schooling show I used to regularly attend, it was a $25/day haul-in fee. Oftentimes, I’d just go one day since jumpers were always on Sunday. Now, I have to pay $175 for a stall, regardless of how many days I want to show.
I don’t mind so much at the rated shows, you’re there so much longer it seems more worth the money to me, but for the schooling shows, I think it’s silly. But, I understand everyone needs to make money and if that’s one way we can keep local schooling shows running, I’ll still support it.
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At that point it basically becomes a $275 office fee, which is a bit absurd for a local show.
I mean, like, you can pay for the stall and go home (sunk cost and all that) but idk, it just feels bad.
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It seems silly to require stalls. More people could show if Haul
Ins were allowed since that would open up
More stalls
The 3% credit card convenience fee is the office passing through the fee that they get charged by Visa/Mastercard on each transaction. They’re just recouping their own costs there.
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And, at least for the show office I worked in, if you wanted to avoid that fee you could simply use a different form of payment at checkout. Some people wanted the convenience or points from using their credit card, and many others opted to use a different form of payment so they could reduce their bill.
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I don’t think you’re looking at it the right way.
Picture this:
The company putting on the show has to pay rental for the facility. The rental rate is a flat fee that gives the company the right to use the covered arena, the 4 outdoor arenas, the 3 barns, and the rest of the showgrounds. There is no price break for not using the barns, or only using 1 or 2 out of the three barns.
What do you expect the company putting on the show to do? Just eat the barn rental costs because you don’t need a stall? So what do you want? Do you want to pay the stall fee or would you rather the show management company decide that they can’t make enough money to justify holding a show at this location?
If management can fill the barns while still allowing haul-ins, then they’re probably going to allow haul-ins. But, if they can’t, and their facility rental contract requires them to pay for the use of the stalls, then they may well start requiring people to get stalls.
Fundamentally, this is just like the “challenging my board increase” discussion. We show attendees tend to look at it from only our own perspective: “Why are they making it so expensive to show?” But we also need to look at it from the perspective of the people holding the show: “How can we cover our expenses and make enough of a profit to make it worth putting on a show?”
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In some cases there is a break for not using the stalls, or only using some. Which may or may not be the case for the OP’s show.
I ran shows at a city-owned facility that had a sliding scale depending on how many rings you used and whether or not you used the stalls. If you did use the stalls you could charge whatever.
At other facilities there are WAY more stalls than a given show will use. For example, when the county-level shows run at Oaks-Blenheim, the manager pays a per-stall fee because there is no way they will use all the stalls.
The Del Mar Fairgrounds at least used to operate in a similar way. I had to scratch once due to a lame horse and couldn’t get the stall fee back. The manager said that she had to commit to paying for however many stalls had been reserved on a date a week or so before the show and couldn’t get the money back if someone cancelled.
Some of the multi-day shows in California have not been allowing haul-ins due to EHV, so everyone has to get a stall. I get that.
YMMV
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Is this show at a rented facility?
At least around here, the majority of unrated shows are not held at rented facilities but put on by a farm. Except for one or two I can think of, anyone who is renting a facility to put on a show is running a rated show.
Also, at least at most facilities I have worked with, you pay for the parts you want to use, not a facility wide rental (unless you want that).
As someone who has worked horse shows, stall rentals are a PITA. Manure removal, electric costs, fights (sometimes it’s passive aggressive stuff, but I’ve also seen full on knockdown fights over stall problems), nightwatch, making sure horses go to the correct stalls, the administration issues because trainer A needs x stalls and Trainer B needs x stalls, dealing with stallion placement, people not cleaning the stalls properly. The list goes on.
If as a show runner I had the chance to not have as many stalls being filled, I’d probably prefer that. You end up making the same amount between the stall rental and haul in fees in a lot of cases once you subtract from the overhead costs of having those stalls.
But, I’m not familiar with what show the OP is referring to, as I don’t know where OP lives. So maybe in their situation, stalls must be rented or the haul in area is not conducive to a lot of trailers.
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[quote=“Night_Flight, post:8, topic:772031”]to decrease chances of transmitting EHV, etc.
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I’m not following the logic. How is it better to force horses to share stalls to ‘decrease chances of transmitting’? To my mind, keeping horses on a trailer, away from other horses and not sharing walls/air space would be safer?
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With stalls you could, theoretically, keep groups of horses associated with different trainers isolated from one another in different clusters of stalls (for most of the day, anyway), which would be disinfected once vacated after each show.
With haul-ins, you have many of the horses being hand-grazed for most of the day on areas of grass grazed by horses from other barns, and potentially sharing water sources, depending on the setup.
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WEC north, for a rented facility example, no HJ show haul ins, rated or unrated. Official reason is no gated area to safely accommodate it, and thats a valid point. But its obvious the set cost to operate the facility is considerable…as is the footing, climate control, lights multiple sets of fancy high quality jumps, judges, ring and gate crew, office staff. Rated or unrated, costs like heck.
For barn hosted shows, they paid and/or are still paying off a fortune in footing, fencing, sets of “real” showjumps, decent officials etc. etc. and entry fees alone wont begin to cover those operating costs. Schooling fees make sense when you consider most exhibitors want to jump around before their class plus horses not entered in any classes ( or who enter one and then scratch after 10 thrips around the schooling ring) will put more use on the footing and jumps then the actual 2 or 3 trips at 2 minutes each they paid for. Boarders at that facility are already paying their fair share but outside horses expecting bargain basement costs to use the facility are…unrealistic.
This is very much another side to the board going up thread.
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I know this show (our trainer is taking several horses), and it is indeed at a rented facility.
And for those who has asked, they are planning to do stabling to provide separation between groups of horses from different barns. Though the no-haul-ins rule is in the pre-printed Prize List, rather than the EVH-1 updates, so not sure if the reason is health/safety or show economics.
Our other major schooling show series still allows haul-ins and charges a slightly lower stall rental fee than this one, but it is at a property owned by the company producing the show (and many use the schooling series as an entry point to eventually showing at their rated shows at the same venue), so I imagine the economics are different.
