The New England Patriots on Sunday punched their ticket to the AFC championship game against the Denver Broncos, but fans looking for tickets will have to pony up.
On Tuesday, resale marketplaces such as SeatGeek showed tickets for Sunday’s game in Denver starting around $600 to about $1,000 after fees, with mid-range sideline spots reaching well beyond $1,200 and premium views priced in the thousands.
Boston-based broker Ace Ticket also showed tickets starting around $550 as of Tuesday afternoon. Tickets for what Ace Ticket rates as a five-star seat start around $950 and quickly climb into the $1,000 to $2,000 range.
Ticketmaster’s listings have been restricted to fans with billing addresses in the Rocky Mountain region. A Ticketmaster spokesperson referred questions to the Denver Broncos and said “sometimes teams will place geographic restrictions on certain events to give local fans the best chance to attend.”
Patrick Smyth, a Broncos spokesperson, said more than 98 percent of season ticket holders opted in for playoff tickets and “the remaining inventory — consisting of only a few thousand tickets — was nearly sold out within 24 hours.”
“As we’ve done for previous AFC Championship Games, the extremely limited amount of single-game tickets on sale for Sunday was restricted to the Rocky Mountain Region to prioritize Broncos fans,” Smyth said by email.
The cost of a ticket could have been even more expensive.
Prices for the game plummeted Saturday night after Broncos coach Sean Payton announced that the team’s starting quarterback, Bo Nix, will not play due to an ankle fracture he suffered in the team’s overtime playoff win against the Buffalo Bills. Ticketdata.com reported the cheapest tickets at about $950 before the announcement and $430 per ticket afterwards. The price has since ticked back up to about $590, according to the site.
Before the Patriots’ win, football fans on some online forums were reporting that prices had briefly dipped as low as $300 to $400 for certain seats in the upper deck before rising as demand solidified.
Jim Holzman, owner of Ace Ticket, said ticket prices for past AFC championship games involving the Patriots held relatively steady because New England made it to the title round so often, playing in eight consecutive conference championship games from 2011 to 2018. He said the last few times the Patriots reached the AFC championship game, tickets started around $350 to $500.
“When people have something on a regular basis, the prices actually flattened,” Holzman said Tuesday. “When you have a team that goes a time without doing something, it drives demand because [interest] builds up.”
Holzman is expecting a strong showing of Patriots fans in Denver on Sunday. He said the drop in price after Nix’s injury made tickets a bit more affordable.
“When the market tanked and hit that bottom price, all of the sudden New England fans started buying and the price has since gone up substantially,” he said. “These are New England fans driving the market.”
Fans in New England who decide to fork over the hundreds or thousands of dollars for tickets will also need to pay to get to Denver, as travel costs have climbed as fans scrambled to lock in flights and hotel rooms.
Searches on major travel sites show that standard flights from Boston to Denver now range widely, with last-minute round-trips often starting around $400 to $500 per person and pushing to well over $1,000, depending on departure date and carrier.
A quick Google search on Tuesday afternoon for flights showed the cheapest roundtrip ticket at $436 for a traveler flying to Denver on Friday and returning on Monday. Most other roundtrip flights were between $500 and $1,200. If you made that search about a week ago, prices would have been around $230, according to Google’s price history tracker.
Searches on sites such as Expedia and Travelocity generally showed that hotel stays in Denver and surrounding areas for the upcoming weekend ranged from as low as $50 per night to $300-$650 per night, depending on the style of hotel and distance from Denver’s downtown area.
Nick Stoico can be reached at nick.stoico@globe.com.