Thomas Benson: Venues Today Box Office Star

Gold Medal Performance

Tickets.com’s Tom Benson is a consummate pro when it comes to the Olympics

Venues Today
By Dave Brooks

For Thomas Benson, the Olympics aren’t just another sporting event — they’re a way of life.

The ticketing veteran has worked three of the last four Olympiads and will be managing box office operations for Tickets.com during the 21st Winter Olympiad from Feb. 12-28 in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia. Benson will oversee the sale and allocation of 1.6 million tickets for 15 separate venues and 86 sporting events.

“If you put a concert on sale, even if you have 10 nights, people are coming to buy one thing. They get in and get out. With this someone comes in and spends 45 minutes shopping because they don’t know what all the different sports are during the last two weeks. There are a lot of decisions to make and tickets are pricey,” said Benson, among winners of this year’s Venues Today Box Office Stars Awards.

Benson’s main task is to manage Tickets.com’s relationship with the Vancouver Olympic Committee (VANOC). Besides being the official ticketing provider, Tickets.com is also a sponsor of the games.

“We are in charge of setting up all of the box offices at all of the venues and hiring a couple hundred people to staff them,” said Benson. “We actually opened a call center up here in Vancouver, so that we could have French speakers and people that are familiar with the area.”

This is the first Olympics for which Tickets.com is implementing access control at every venue with hand scanners and bar-coded tickets. All box office managers will report directly to Benson, and the Tickets.com team plans to bring up several American box office managers to help with the games, including Debra Duncan, the director of ticketing for the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

“We’ve got a number of people like that who have done it and loved it and are coming back,” Benson said.

Benson got his start working at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The University of Utah grad was hired after spending several years working with ArtTix. He came back four years later to work the winter games in Torino, Italy.

“I was still in college at the time I started; it was my last year. It was kind of a big deal, especially being from Utah,” Benson said. “Salt Lake was a challenge because it was the first time the Internet was really a force in ticketing. We sold some ridiculous percentage of our tickets online there, 90 percent I think. That was kind of a first.”

Benson said one of the biggest challenges with the Winter Games is that most tickets are sold well before the venues are completed, so ticketing personnel don’t get a lot of information about how their venues will be configured.

“You don’t really know what your inventory is going to look like, but you have to put them on sale anyway,” Benson said.

When Benson is not working for one of the Olympic Games, he handles special projects for Tickets.com. After the Salt Lake games, he spent some time working with the Cleveland Indians, before moving to Virginia and later to Huntington Beach, Calif., just a few miles from the Tickets.com office. He said he gets a rush working the Olympic Games — when competitor Ticketmaster won the 2008 Summer Games in Beijing, Benson took a temporary position with Coca-Cola so he could be part of one of the games.

“Each host city is totally different,” Benson said. “In Torino there were a lot of people who bought late. They procrastinated and they didn’t really get excited until the Olympics started. We went into the games with a lot of walk up inventory. [In Vancouver] people are pretty excited about it. Anytime there is release of any tickets, they get snapped up pretty quickly.”

A lot of people ask him, “‘Why were you there two years before, how hard can it be to sell tickets?’ It’s a big deal. It takes a whole lot of planning to put together something as big as the Olympics in such a short amount of time,” he said.
While he’s in Canada, Benson is also expected to do some business development. The 2010 games are the biggest deployment yet for Tickets.com’s new ProVenue system, a powerful ticketing solution developed to compete against Ticketmaster and Veritix.

“We are hoping to leverage this to get more business in Canada and get more people familiar with our system,” Benson said. “Some of the box office managers we have coming in say they applied for the job so they could see us and get to know our system better. We are excited about that.”

For the first time, the Olympic committee is creating a secondary marketplace to allow both fans and sponsors to resell tickets. Benson said his company is also offering a consignment program for unsold sponsor tickets.

“Sponsors can go back online and consign them to us and we will sell them — online or at the box office. When they do sell, we will credit the client back. It’s basically them giving back the tickets and if they re-sell, we give them a credit.”

Benson said the goal is to get spectators into the best seats. He noted that during the Beijing Games, there were thousands of empty seats at every venue because many sponsor would over order tickets.

“And you had people who would give their right eye just to see anything and they were lined up down the street,” said Benson. “It’s not fair to the athletes who worked so hard to get there and would like to have a full stand cheering them on.”