BRIAN LEARST is the CEO of hospitality provider QuintEvents. The Charlotte-based company offers travel and hospitality packages to some of the world's biggest sporting events, including the NFL Super Bowl, NBA All-Star Game, Kentucky Derby, MotoGP and various others. Learst, who started the business out of the basement of his house, also counts F1 among his list of clients. QuintEvents became an authorized distributor of the series' premier hospitality offering, Formula One Paddock Club, in '12. It also provides secondary hospitality for the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. QuintEvents' newest addition is the Mexican F1 Grand Prix, which will give its comeback on Nov. 1. As an official partner of race promoter CIE, the company will provide secondary hospitality packages for the race weekend. SBD Global talked to Learst about QuintEvent's newest event, F1's global appeal and the sports hospitality business.
On how the deal with CIE came about...
Brian Learst: Formula One itself keeps all the hospitality rights. If the local promoter wants to negotiate hospitality rights, it’s kind of a separate negotiation. So that finished up [five] weeks ago or so between them and then that allowed us to finish up our negotiations to be that secondary hospitality rights provider. The Paddock Club being the primary hospitality center, and then anything that is sold where there’s a ticket with food and beverage service would be what Formula One considers secondary hospitality. As the secondary hospitality provider, we have quite a few tickets in the main grandstand building and our hospitality center will be right [behind it]. It will be a large chalet, and it will be a kind of mixed or shared facility similar to the Paddock Club, but not quite at the scale of the Paddock Club. In sections 8 and 9, in what’s called the stadium section of track, we have additional seats and another large tent. Both of them will be called the Legends Club. That’s what we will be selling. The demand down there is just unbelievable. We have just about the only inventory that is left. We expect it go pretty quickly once the word gets out that this inventory exists because a lot of people don’t think anything exists anymore.
 |
Source: FORMULA 1 GRAN PREMIO DE MEXICO
|
On the importance of motorsports and in particular F1 for QuintEvents...
Learst: We started in F1, both with [the Circuit of the Americas] and with the Paddock Club at the same time, the first year that COTA opened, so this will be our fourth year. We did the agreements with both Formula One and COTA almost simultaneously, even though they are two different groups, two different deals. The demand for F1 continues to get stronger and stronger. It’s remarkable what they have been able to do with all the events. Obviously just like with anything, there are some events that have higher demand than others, but overall it’s continued to get stronger for us. We are doing more this year than we did last year, and we did more that year than the year before. We are doing quite a bit up in Montreal now; Monaco is a popular one; we do a lot with Abu Dhabi. It continues to grow and the demand has been fantastic. ... Our motorsports business will probably do $20-$25 million worth of volume this year. About 80 percent of our motorsports business will be F1. It’s a significant number and growing. We’ve only been doing it for a little over three years. It’s going to be a significant number, a significant part of our business. And we don’t do much of anything with NASCAR or some of the motorsports here in the States. It’s primarily Formula One and MotoGP. We do a fair amount of work with them. MotoGP has been a really successful product for us as well, and actually growing here in the States. A lot of the young people, the millennials are pretty into it.
On what F1 customers can expect...
Learst: The Paddock Club will always be the place to be. I don’t think there’s any question about that. You are right there overlooking the pit. It’s the only way you can get a pit-lane walk and Paddock access. This year they are doing a Friday night party as well. The Paddock Club is always going to be the premier hospitality and we realize that. However, what we found at COTA is that it really is an additive situation. Not everybody can afford a Paddock Club ticket and not everybody needs that level of experience, so having both you are just meeting more of the market demand. … Now there are basically three tiers: You can either just buy a ticket to attend the race; if you want to entertain guests or your top clients, but you don’t need the ultimate experience of the Paddock Club, you got a nice tier in-between; and the Paddock Club is always going to be the ultimate experience in F1; you just can’t get any better access than that. One of the things with secondary hospitality and what we try to do is incorporate more of the local feel and flair. The Paddock Club is going to be pretty close to the same no matter where you go and that’s one of the beauties of it. You always have consistently high quality of experience. But with us we try to create more of a local flair to it, whether it’s in the food and beverages there, the entertainment that we bring in or the drivers that we bring in. We are trying to create something that’s going to appeal more to the local market, or at least even if you are coming from a foreign country you are going to get a feel for what Mexico is all about, what makes the Mexico Grand Prix different than COTA or Silverstone, or wherever else you might go.
On the business of sports hospitality...
Learst: It’s a growing trend because so many people nowadays want to buy the official product, and that’s what our whole company has been built on with the NFL, Kentucky Derby, NBA and so forth. People are afraid to buy unless they know who it is, especially for international travelers. If I would have traveled to Sochi for the Olympics or the World Cup, I would have been a little bit worried because I don’t know the laws and ethics in that country. They are a little bit different everywhere. I would be worried I could get ripped off, pay thousands of dollars on a website and then travel all the way across the world to go see an event and then find out it wasn’t real. That’s got to be a pretty scary thing. We are selling on a global basis. Part of the reason for the program is to allow access on an official basis where people don’t have to deal with a secondary market for their tickets and can get it direct through the organizing body. If you are in Great Britain or Italy, or wherever, knowing that you are dealing with the official source and not a ticket broker is a big deal. [Customers] just want the comfort of knowing that they are really going to get it when they get here. … We’ll provide as much or as little as people want us to provide.
Hangin' With runs each Friday in SBD Global.
