US, Aussie Olympic tickets nearly sell out
Canadians who had to contend with the convoluted lottery system the Vancouver Organizing Committee used to allocate tickets to the 2010 Games will have some sympathy for their American and Australian counterparts.
This week CoSport, Vanoc’s authorized ticket agent for a number of countries, announced results of lotteries it conducted in the US and Australia. No one who witnessed the Canadian lottery system will be surprised to discover that tickets in the US and Australia were also in short supply. See the story here.
I suppose it’s a happy place for Vanoc to be when many of its 170 events are so oversubscribed that the only way to fairly allocate tickets is by lottery.
However, try telling that to those who came out of the lotteries empty-handed, without even so much as a nosebleed seat to a hockey game. Over the last month I’ve been regularly called by people angry either that they didn’t get any tickets, or that they got tickets to events they didn’t really want but applied for in the hope of increasing their odds of getting something, anything.
It turns out that Americans and Australians have had a similar experience. Demand in both countries was so high that Jet Set Sports, the sister company to CoSport, injected thousands of tickets from its own sponsor allocation.
Caley Denton, Vanoc’s vice-president of ticketing, said Tuesday that’s because Vanoc couldn’t fill all the requests made by national Olympic Committees. Even the Canadian Olympic Committee didn’t get all the tickets it wanted.
Vanoc will produce about 1.6 million tickets, with 70 per cent of them going to the public. Of that, less than 30 per cent of that 70 per cent will go to people outside of Canada, he said. The vast majority has been reserved for Canadians, and he allowed that Vanoc could easily have sold more tickets for higher prices if it had chosen to.
You can find details of CoSport’s American and Australian ticket sales here.
On a related note, my friend Peter Morgan over at Morgan News: 2010, an industry newsletter, noted that while CoSport says it used a “reputable, worldwide audit and tax firm to oversee the effectiveness of the lottery”, it wouldn’t identify the firm.
"Based on our agreement with the auditing firm, we are unable to release the name of the firm.,” he said was CoSport’s emailed reply to his query as to the identity of the auditors.
"The company also refused to disclose whether it was the auditing firm, CoSport, its parent firm or Jet Set Sports that placed the gag clause in the agreement, or whether the firm had any connection to VANOC. To those questions, the spokesman will only say, "We are unable to provide this information to the public." CoSport said initially it hired the firm "to ensure fairness and transparency during the lottery process."
Denton told me that Vanoc used Deloitte to independently audit the Canadian lottery. He didn’t know who CoSport used.
Last September Vanoc signed Deloitte as an official supplier of professional services.
http://communities.canada.com/vancouvers...sie-olympic-tickets-nearly-sell-out.aspx