Snowboarding
UPDATED: Winter Olympic Tickets Are Quite A Process
UPDATE: A hearty thanks to Peter Morgan for clarifying some points in the comments of this article. Among his points:
- On two websites: the IOC only allows the Vancouver Organizing Committee the right to do business on its own inside Canada.
- Not all Olympic sports events go through the lottery method.
- Other credit card companies negotiate similar exclusive rights to what Visa has for this one.
The original article:
I hadn’t really thought of this before, but after reading what Americans have to go through to procure tickets to the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, I thought: what do Canadians have to do? After all, I had read stories about empty seats in Beijing. I suppose that made me think there would always be more supply than demand for Olympic tickets. Not so.
Canadians, like Americans and everyone else, need to enter a lottery too; albeit at a different website (why this is the case is beyond me). The process goes something like this: request an event or ticket package, give them your credit card info, pick some alternates in case you don’t get the ones you want, sit back, hope. Tickets will be allocated in November. Oh, and the only credit card accepted is Visa, ’cause they’re an official sponsor.
Tickets not allocated in the lottery (read: unpopular events) will go on sale in February 2009.
According to the Vancouver 2010 site, more than 100,000 tickets will cost less than $25, and half of the tickets are priced at $100 or less. Snowboarding events were generally priced in the $100 to $150 range from what I could tell. There’s no seat selection process; in fact, I would venture to guess there aren’t any seats at most events anyway. Show up early, I suppose.
It’s great to see there’s so much demand for tickets, and it sounds like the allocation process is relatively fair. It just sucks that many people are likely to be turned away from events they’d like to see due to the demand. But that beats empty seats any day.
Discussion
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It has to be a different process and website for countries outside of Canada because the IOC only allows the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) the right to do business on its own inside Canada.
The IOC focus is quite territorial. Thus, VANOC has to set up ticket-sales contracts with each of the roughly 100 national Olympic committees in other countries that are expected to field Olympic teams for the 2010 Games. The US Olympic Committee, for instance, contracts with jet Set Sports (or CoSports, it’s sister company) to sell tickets in the US and several other countries.
In addition, not all Olympic sports events go through the lottery method, only those where the request for seats outnumbers the actual seats. It’s the only fair way to grant ticket requests for those events.
Once you’re informed by VANOC (or your local national Olympic committee contractor) you’ve got your ticket request, the actual seats you get will be allocated next summer, when VANOC knows precisely which specific seats are available — they’re still dickering, for instance, over where broadcast facilities are to be located in each venue.
VANOC, because of contractual commitments has to reserve 30% of seating at each venue for internal Olympic use, and that’s actually less than at any Olympics up to now, which means that there are at least 70% of the tickets at each event available to the public.
By the way VANOC also intends to set up a website next year to deal with the ticket-exchange market, in an effort to reduce scalping, and it hopes that people will use that if, say, their national team doesn’t get into the playoffs to which they hold tickets, thus freeing them up for fans of the country that did get to the playoffs.
VANOC’s also required to deal exclusively with Visa because that organization is a major, international sponsor of the Olympics through the IOC — support to the tune of millions of dollars per set of Games — and has negotiated those rights for previous years, and for years to come.
Other credit card companies negotiate similar exclusive rights with other events organizers, shutting out, say, Visa, so it’s not unusual.