MITAC: New Ticket Office Offers
Discounted Tickets to Many Activities

Diane Betz Tavitian

The MIT Activities Committee (MITAC) invites all MIT faculty, and the entire MIT community, to its recently inaugurated new “Ticket Office” along the Charles Vest Student Street in the Stata Center. Discounted tickets to numerous cultural and recreational activities can be bought for one’s own use, or as gifts for family, friends, and colleagues. The offerings are broad and numerous, and the savings are significant.

MITAC is an employee benefit service that was launched in 1983 in Building 20 as a pilot program to negotiate discounts to movies, sporting events, museums, theater productions, etc.; to arrange special programs and events for the MIT community to help build community and employee morale; and, in general, to provide employees economical access to many of the leisure time activities available in the Greater Boston Area. Since then, MITAC has grown to the point where in the 2015 calendar year it sold almost 40,000 tickets to over 5,000 customers who collectively saved more than $285,000 – a savings to the MIT community of 10% to 60% of the retail value of tickets. MITAC is guided by both a volunteer program committee, which organizes many of the unique special events MITAC offers, and a presidentially appointed Advisory Council which provides guidance on long-term goals and planning, business practices, and policies.

When the Radiation Lab, aka Building 20 (“The Magic Incubator”), was torn down in 1998, the MITAC office moved from the first floor of Building 20 to the basement of Walker Memorial, a location even harder to find than its original home.      When the Stata Center was opened on the site of Building 20 in 2004, MITAC came full circle and set up shop near the Forbes Family Café at the east end of the Student Street traversing Stata. This location was much more accessible to customers and sales increased, but the open-air desk was less than ideal for customers and operations.

New MITAC Ticket Office
(click on image to enlarge)

The new “Ticket Office” is a dedicated office area for MITAC constructed last fall on the site of the open-air MITAC desk. The new area provides enhanced customer services and the MITAC staff with more space to do the behind-the-scenes work needed to run the day-to-day operations, and can be closed up at night. During the day the Ticket Office opens revealing a ticket counter, as well as racks of activity brochures and literature. Video displays on the outer walls describe MITAC’s current offerings 24/7.

Other changes are also coming soon for MITAC and its customers. The Website is currently being revamped, the new site is being made mobile-device accessible, and an on-line ticketing service will be inaugurated in coming months.

MITAC offers a wide spectrum of more than 250 cultural and recreational events annually to our community. Regularly discounted tickets include those for:

• Boston Bruins & Boston Celtics

• Movies (AMC, Showcase, Regal, Landmark, IMAX, Chunky’s)

• Local attractions (Boston Children’s Museum, Museum of Science, New England Aquarium, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Peabody Essex Museum, Gardner Museum)

• Broadway shows

• Boston Pops

• Boston Symphony Orchestra

• World Music

• Special family events

For more information, subscribe to MITAC’s weekly and monthly electronic newsletters, and/or visit MITAC online, on campus (Stata Ticket Office, Tuesday thru Friday, 11 am – 4 pm), or at Lincoln Laboratory (A-109, Thursday and Friday, 11 am – 4 pm). Questions and activity suggestions can be sent to: mitac-office@mit.edu.

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