With talk of streets closing for premier events, moving about in buses in downtown Vancouver could prove challenging.
Get ready for two-hour-long excursions to Whistler while facing weather-canceled events in mountain venues.
If you want a men’s ice hockey gold medal game ticket, you better know a guy who knows a guy.
Mega problems? No. Just your standard headaches for corporate hospitality operators planning for the Winter Olympics.
“Because a Winter Olympics is smaller than a Summer Games, that doesn’t make it any less complex,” said SportsMark President Keith Bruce.
Logistics and ticketing issues are still shaking out, but, surprisingly, business seems OK for key players in the Olympic corporate hospitality space. There’s no desperation in their voices.
Locking up clients before the economic downturn was critical, said Bruce and Jet Set Sports’ CEO, Sead Dizdarevic. They and other key players, such as Maritz, have been seeking Vancouver business for at least three years.
SportsMark created this bobsled-themed
hospitality suite for Visa at the
Torino Olympics.
SportsMark focused this cycle on VANOC Games-level sponsors and suppliers, such as Bell Canada, Vincor Canada (wine), Nortel and Sun Microsystems. TOP sponsor Visa remains in their portfolio, too.
Dizdarevic, who said his company has sold full-service hospitality packages to more than 40 companies, agreed that getting in early was a valuable move. Business slowed considerably in late 2008, but 85 percent of his corporate accounts were locked up before then. “If the Games were in 2011, we definitely would have been affected” by the economy, he said.
Maritz lists VANOC supporter Ricoh, and suppliers Purolator and Haworth (office furnishings), as clients. Wayne Eldevik, chief of Maritz’s Olympic services unit, said it was key to affiliate with companies that weren’t “in a highly distressed industry. … In this environment, I think every company out there is ensuring that any dollar is spent wisely and is about ROI.”
SportsWorld and iLuka, two United Kingdom-based firms, are also active in Vancouver.
The average stay for hospitality guests is four to five days. Perhaps the biggest challenge for hospitality firms during that time is the far-flung nature of the Winter Games. The home base for Olympic hospitality will be downtown Vancouver and guests will be able to stay local for such events as hockey, figure skating, short-track speedskating and curling. However, Whistler will be the home to such events as bobsled, luge and skiing, and guests will need to take a bus to get there.
A new train from Vancouver to Whistler is cost-prohibitive and operationally tough. Using the train would mean busing a group to the Vancouver train station, hopping on the train and hiring another bus in Whistler.
The long bus trips will require creativity, said SportsMark’s Olympic operations director, Pete Moore. “We have an idea of turning the bus into a movie theater, with popping corn,” Moore said. “Or some kind of a culinary experience.”
With a captive audience, a corporate client, such as Vincor Canada, can expose its products, too. Expect wine tastings on a bus ride to luge.
Jet Set, as the hospitality and corporate and consumer ticket package sponsor of the U.S. Olympic Committee and other national federations, will get quickie highlights from NBC and show them on their buses. But Eldevik takes a more tranquil approach as some guests don’t want the ride to be “too busy,” he said. “The mountain experience is ultimately about nature so we believe in putting that front and center.”
As for the hottest ticket for corporate clients: the men’s hockey final. Depending on a corporate sponsor’s deal with VANOC, for every 100 hospitality guests, it could nab as many as 40 tickets to the final game. If not, a year out, a ticket on the secondary market costs as much as $7,000.
Jay Weiner is a writer in Minnesota.
