By MIKE KELLEY
Only a few tickets are left for Friday’s Preference Dance in the ELWC Ballroom, the others are sold out.
Tickets for all the Preference locations were sold out by Tuesday at 9:30 a.m., said Patty Tonioli, coordinator of campus activities for BYUSA.
Wednesday at noon, BYUSA decided they could accommodate more students in the ELWC Ballroom. These tickets were offered to students on the approximately 300-person waiting list, said Kitty Karr, from the business support office.
Tonioli said students on the waiting list for Saturday’s dance are out of luck, but for those who are willing to go Friday, there are a few spaces.
One reason for the lack of tickets for this year’s dance is there are usually several thousand students who go to the Utah State Capitol Building for Preference, but BYUSA is no longer allowed to go outside Utah County to hold dances, said Karen Duffin, public relations director for BYUSA.
BYUSA normally reserves the Springville Art Museum and the County Courthouse for Preference, but those locations had already been reserved by other organizations and were not available for the dance, Toniolo said.
To compensate, BYUSA found other locations to hold dances.
“There are the same amount of locations for this year’s dance as there were for last year’s dance, but each place holds fewer students,” Duffin said.
Duffin said BYUSA campus activities is excited that so many students want to go to Preference.
“We are trying to serve those students who couldn’t get tickets for the dance by selling a few more tickets for some of the Preference locations, like the Provo Park Hotel, the Chillon Reception Center in Spanish Fork, the Wilkinson Center and the Tanner Building,” Tonioli said.
The predicament for BYUSA campus activities is deciding whether it is better to have a few packed locations where tickets are sold out and a few students can’t go, or having a lot of locations with few students in attendance, she said.
“It’s difficult to predict how many students will buy tickets to Preference from year to year,” Tonioli said. “There are more students wanting to buy tickets for Preference this year than in the past, and we just can’t accommodate all of them.”
Jen Pingree, program director in charge of Fall Preference and a sophomore from Salt Lake City majoring in human development, said there are always some people who do not get tickets.
“Almost every year, there are some people who can’t get tickets, but it is usually because they wait until Thursday or Friday to purchase them,” she said.
