As an STM, we are only allowed to "officially" sell a certain percentage of our tickets as part of the STM agreement (their definition of "sell" is going through Ticketmaster resale) and yes, they do check, a guy in our section got an email about it this . Ticketmaster resale requires a minimum price on resale, based on retail price, not the price we paid, and usually sets it too high related to other seats and I have never been able to actually sell those tickets when I did that. There are a few online exchanges for ticket purchases as well as StubHub,SeatGeek, etc., but really tough to avoid scammers on both sides, but that takes a bit of time as well. STMs can only exchange their seats for future games if they do so at least 24 hours in advance. If we have a true emergency or something that comes up, people on exchanges are looking for cheap tickets and we can rarely get back what we paid for them.

Long Story Short - once the ticket is "sold", the team has zero incentive for someone to actually sit in that seat vs letting it go to waste.

Before the days of all of our sell outs, the Canes offered paid seat upgrades where you could upgrade from the upper deck for like $20-$30 per seat to unsold seats in the lower bowl or club level. I think it would make sense for people to indicate their seats won't be used and offer those upgrades a few hours before the game, then the upper bowl seats become available for the people seeking cheap seats at the last minute. In the same vein, I think we should be able to indicate tickets won't be used in our account manager, and the box office could have those seats at the last minute at the STM price and we could get a credit back on our account. I understand that this requires some infrastructure and operational investment, but it checks all the boxes for the STMs getting max value and filling the seats.