VANOC Officials Look To Make Stricter Ticket Policies For 2010
VANOC officials for the 2010 Vancouver Games are "vowing to make the most concerted effort in Olympic history to solve ticketing woes that have plagued past Games for years," according to Rod Mickleburgh of the GLOBE & MAIL. VANOC Exec VP/Revenue, Marketing & Communications Dave Cobb said, "I think we're going to come back from these [Beijing] Games and push our guys even harder than we did before to improve on what the ticketing standard has been for past Olympics. If it's not managed well, and the seats aren't full, that could be one of our biggest negatives in 2010." VANOC is "trying to establish a complex, groundbreaking marketplace on the Internet where sponsors in particular will be pressed to unload tickets they know they would waste." The site will be "updated as close to an event as possible." Cobb also would "like to see a reduction in the number of venue seats set aside for the news media, which are rarely close to capacity." Cobb: "Those sections are far too big. We need to shrink them down to size. I was at swimming the other night. You look across at the media section and you feel half the arena is taken up. It's a big atmosphere killer." Meanwhile, VANOC is "taking its concerns over scalping and ticketing scams to the heart of Canada's business community." Letters "warning about unauthorized Olympic tickets are being sent by VANOC this month directly to 1,200 of Canada's largest companies, plus the Canadian Chamber of Commerce for distribution to its 176,000 members" (GLOBE & MAIL, 8/16). The CP reported "less room for the press and tighter policing of corporate seats is planned for the 2010 Olympics to avoid some of the buzz kill happening at the Beijing Games." Cobb said, "It's not a revenue issue because we've already sold the ticket but the biggest thing to me is an atmosphere issue for the athletes and the other people in the venue." Meanwhile, VANOC VP/Ticketing Caley Denton said that "using the technology embedded in the tickets, organizers will also be keeping track of which corporate partners and sports federations are squandering seats" (CP, 8/16).
LONDON 2012: Univ. of Western Ontario Int'l Centre for Olympic Studies Dir Kevin Wamsley said of the 2012 London Games trying to compete with the Beijing Games, "England won't even attempt to. To try to match China would be financially prohibitive. But more important, England doesn't have to" (TORONTO SUN, 8/17).
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