The Olympics Take A Stab At Secondary Tickets

Venues Today
By Dave Brooks

After years of opposing the resale of event tickets, the Vancouver Olympic Committee has introduced the first Olympic-sanctioned ticketing resale program. Powered by Tickets.com, the new system has separate tiers for consumers to sell tickets to other consumers, and an additional site for sponsors to trade and resell tickets to other sponsors.

For Canadian ticket buyers, the “fan-to-fan” marketplace at vancouver2010.com is designed to help fill empty seats and create a safe, reliable resale market where fans can sell their tickets without having to worry if they are stolen or counterfeit. Only Canadians who purchased their tickets through the VANOC system are allowed to list and sell tickets, although international visitors are allowed to view and purchase tickets.

“Obviously with any event out there, there is a secondary market, but we wanted to make sure we could keep control of it,” said Thomas Benson, director of Ticketing for Tickets.com’s Olympic operations. “Nothing is worse than somebody who shows up for the opening ceremonies and bought a ticket from a guy on the corner and it turns out the ticket is not valid after they shelled out $1,500. That’s pretty heart breaking. This is legitimate and it’s the only guaranteed way to get a ticket on the secondary market.”

The Olympic secondary marketplace will operate like most other sites — there will be no limits on price markup (although tickets can’t be sold below face), and like Tickets.com’s deal with StubHub and Major League Baseball, all tickets will be re-barcoded and reprinted for the buyer once the sale is complete. Secondary buyers will pick up their tickets from the will call window. VANOC will charge a 10-percent fee to both the seller and buyer for each transaction.

The VANOC team originally considered putting some limitations on how high a ticket could be marked up, but decided to scrap the caps.

“Basically we want to get as many people into the system as we can and as soon as you put a limit on it they go to Craigslist and sell their ticket because there is no limit there,” Benson said.

The other system announced was a platform for sponsors to sell and trade tickets to other sponsors. Unlike the consumer website, sponsors are not allowed to mark up the price of tickets, nor are they allowed to sell the tickets to the general public. If a sponsor has a difficult time filling a particular seat, they can consign the tickets to VANOC, which will place the inventory back into the primary market at no cost to the sponsor.

“Sponsors cannot directly sell to the public. VANOC was very adamant that sponsors should not be trying to pass off the tickets they purchased. They didn’t sign a sponsorship agreement so that they can scalp tickets. The sponsors are only allowed to sell to each other at face value,” Benson said.

The system was not budgeted for in the original Olympic contract with Tickets.com, explained Caley Denton, VANOC’s vice president for ticketing and consumer marketing. The fees on the consumer site are designed to help the platform pay for itself, and Denton said tickets can only be listed for up to 24 hours before an event.

“The message to the consumer is simple. If someone’s selling tickets outside of our Web site, people need to ask themselves why are they doing that and [question if that is a valid ticket],” Denton said during a press conference on Dec. 21. “We expect fairly high prices to start, as people test the market. Tickets will go quickly on the site, so people who are interested in a particular event should go fairly often.”

The other goal the new system achieves is striking a balance between sponsor tickets and public tickets. The goal was to have 70 percent of all tickets — and at least 30 percent of any event — available to the public. Allowing sponsors to consign tickets to the public through the site returns some high demand tickets into the hands of the public without a high-markup, said Dave Cobb, deputy CEO of the VANOC games, pointing out that the committee was also much more careful how sponsor tickets were allotted this year.

“We expect to have a minimum of 40 percent high demand tickets for each session [available to the public],” he said. “We think that’s a result of being very careful [during our review of ticket purchases] and making sure they are valid orders. That resulted in a significant reduction of tickets and provided 80,000 tickets more than we started with.”

If sponsors can’t trade or consign unwanted Olympic tickets, VANOC also has a site to donate the tickets to “children and families, Aboriginal peoples, and residents of Vancouver’s inner-city neighborhoods” through its Celebrate 2010 program. VANOC organizers hope to provide 50,000 free tickets to the public. Fans can donate their tickets for free on VANOC’s website, although Canadian law prevents them from writing off the tickets as a tax deduction.