I had always thought that ‘box’ and ‘suite’ were interchangeable, certainly on espn.com the terms ‘luxury box’ and ‘luxury suite’ have been synonymous over the years in discussions of different stadiums in different sports. But looking at the Pirates’ webpage, it appears that in this case, as best as I can tell, that Matt is correct (sorry Josh). Luxury suite is when you get your own room with all-you-can-eat food and access to a couple rows of seats that are just for your own room. As I mentioned in an earlier post, they’re awesome.
They’re also expensive. I was surprised when I read Josh’s initial post suggesting that the group could afford a suite like that. And upon further investigation, it looks like we can’t. There’s no official price listing for suites, you have to call them and negotiate a price, presumably like you would for a car (plus they’re all different), but it says they’re generally between $3000 and $5000. It also says you can get them on plans for 10, 20, or 40 games, but there was nothing to indicate that you can get one for a single game. So I’m not sure of the details on how you got into one for $20, but my guess would be that bynmellon had a package plan and was picking up most of the cost for you. When we used the CMU suite several years ago I don’t remember paying anything cause CMU had it covered (although we may have paid a small fee like you did, I can’t remember for sure).
The Pirates’ webpage is using ‘box’ – in a way that I would consider to be questionable at best and misleading at worst – to refer to what is basically a section of a section, or some cases simply the whole section. So simply put, they’re the seats in the stands.
If there’s something I’m missing here, let me know. I’m finding the Pirates’ webpage to be a lot less user-friendly than I’d expected, and I can’t actually find useful information on what group rates we’d get in the stands without submitting a lot of information. I’m still interested in our group going to a game, but I’m not the one to sort out the details, my patience with the Pirates’ webpage is already running out. It is starting to remind me of the Verizon webpage, which I’m convinced is deliberately designed to be terrible so you’ll have to call them and then they can try n sell you more stuff.