How a new Ford Amphitheater not in Vail and ticket sites are creating confusion for concertgoers

The Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Vail has never branded itself as the Ford Amphitheater, but the shortened handle has stuck nonetheless.

It has never been an issue until this summer when a new venue in Colorado Springs sold its naming rights to the Ford Motor Company, and the Colorado Springs location chose that moniker.

Some concertgoers predicted it would be an issue. On Instagram, in a post announcing the venue’s new name, one user predicted that there would be “a lot of (upset) people who bought tickets to the wrong venue.”

Dave Dressman, the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater’s event director, said that prediction did indeed come to pass recently when concertgoers showed up in Vail to see The Beach Boys with tickets to the Colorado Springs venue. The Beach Boys played the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater on Aug. 15 and the Ford Amphitheater on Aug. 16.

“There were a significant number of people who showed up who bought the wrong ticket, or thought they were at the right venue and weren’t,” Dressman said. “We did our best to handle the challenges, but there were tears.”

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Part of Dressman’s job has involved taking on head of sponsorship duties over the last 20 years at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater, and he said it has occurred to him in the past that the Ford Motor Company would be a less-than-ideal business to take on the naming rights of another venue in Colorado.

“If you were to have asked me, ‘What would be the one brand you would not want sponsoring another venue in Colorado?’ I would have answered ‘Ford Motor Company,'” he said. “In my opinion, it’s not ideal for either venue.”

The Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater is owned by the town of Vail and is rented out to the Vail Valley Foundation on a long-term lease. The venue opened in 1987 after years of work constructing the outdoor venue into the side of a hill in Vail’s Gerald R. Ford Park. The idea to put an amphitheater in the park dates back to the 1970s, and the incipient amphitheater was referred to as Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater as early as 1981 in Vail.

In 1977, the Vail Town Council approved a resolution dedicating the park in Ford’s name as a statement of the community’s appreciation and respect for Ford, a part-time Vail resident and former president of the United States who planned his 1976 election campaign from Vail. The resolution said the former president “has shown through his private life and his public life a commitment to recreation, the environment and places set aside” and that the town “is indebted to Gerald R. Ford the man and Gerald R. Ford the President of the United States for his contribution to this community.”

Ford himself dealt with some of the same confusion, often clarifying that he was not related to the Henry Ford family. A campaign button worn by his supporters in 1976 showed a picture of a Model T with the words “for president” underneath it.

Dressman said there’s no legal recourse the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater can take, even if it wanted to, but the event director emphasized that the Vail Valley Foundation definitely would not want to pursue legal action, even if it could.

“The hope would be at some point, in the future, the Vail Valley Foundation and the Ford Amphitheater are able to talk and find a solution that benefits everyone,” he said. “But at this point, we haven’t reached out to them. We’re just seeing how things go.”

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Part of the problem lies in the fact that AEG’s Rocky Mountain division is responsible for the programming for both venues, so there are going to be overlapping artists. In addition to the Beach Boys, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss and Walker Hayes are also scheduled to play at both venues.

Dressman said one advantage the Vail Valley Foundation has is the fact that it has “a box office with live humans” to help deal with customer service issues.

“For a lot of concerts these days, you’re buying through Ticketmaster or some other ticketing platform and you never interact with a human, it’s all on your phone and digital,” he said. “We treat customer service very differently in Vail and across the Vail Valley Foundation, we’re solutions-based and we’ll do our best to handle the challenges.”