2010 Ticket Information

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Buy a ticket bundle for best chance of Vancouver 2010 tickets: Vanoc

Derrick Penner, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, September 10, 2008

The public's best chance to get tickets to premier 2010 Olympic events will be by purchasing bundled ticket packages that Olympic organizers are putting together, officials have revealed.

Vancouver Olympic organizers will open sales for the biggest block of tickets available to the public starting Oct. 3, and have begun a three-week campaign to unveil the information would-be buyers need to try to gain access to the high-demand sports.

There won't be a rush because tickets will not be sold on a first-come-first-served basis. Games organizers will take applications for tickets from Oct. 3 to Nov. 7; no matter when they arrive, all applications will receive equal consideration.

Purchasers will also need to pull out their Visa cards. Although Vanoc won't charge their cards right away, a credit card number will be needed to secure a purchase order. Visa will be the only one accepted, since the company is a top Winter Games sponsor.

However, there will also be a method to buy tickets using a cheque or money order.

Priority for filling public ticket orders, however, will go to those who want to buy what Vanoc officials are calling Olympic experience packages: multi-day packages that bundle at least one event ticket per day, plus one ticket to one of the nightly victory ceremonies at BC Place Stadium, where the majority of medals will be presented.

"[Package purchasers] will be seated before [individual ticket purchasers] at an event," said Caley Denton, vice-president of ticketing and consumer marketing for the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games [Vanoc].

"Having said that, we will never sell out the full public allocation [of tickets] through packages," Denton added.

The packages will be designed much like cable television bundles, but Dave Cobb, Vanoc's executive-vice president for revenue and marketing, denied the exercise is about offloading tickets to less desirable sports along with seats to marquee events.

"It isn't about filling weak events," Cobb said, because Vanoc officials know they will be able to sell out venues.

"Our objective is getting people into seats and getting as many tickets as possible into the hands of the public," he said.

Details about Olympic-experience packages will be released Sept. 17, when Vanoc relaunches its website. Denton said there will be two different programs, one aimed at short-term visitors and another for local residents to take advantage of, with event tickets for evening and weekend sporting sessions.

Cobb added that packages were designed based on consumer research and the logistics of getting purchasers to all the events.

Nor will they come at a discount. Denton said prices will be the total face-value amount of the event tickets, including the victory ceremony.

Vanoc has also revealed ticket details for the nightly victory ceremonies. They will make available 30,000 tickets for the events, which will include entertainment by top acts, as well as presentation of most of the competition medals.

Some 10,000 tickets will be free, but the bulk of 20,000 will be sold for $22 each.

Cobb, in a briefing, said Vanoc is now confident it will exceed its $232-million revenue target for ticket sales, based on its market research and requests for tickets by the so-called Olympic family of national Olympic committees, sponsors and sports federations.

The $231 million figure in Vanoc's current budget was based on an estimate that it would sell almost 90 per cent of available tickets.

"We know if [tickets] go on sale to the public, and they don't sell as many as expected, we'll go back to the Olympic family and fill their orders," Cobb said.

As it is, Cobb added that Vanoc won't be able to fill all of the requests that Olympic family members have placed for tickets.

Vanoc will have two million tickets to sell, 1.6 million to the sports events and opening and closing ceremonies, the rest to the nightly ceremonies.

Vanoc has vowed that 70 per cent of those 1.6 million competition and ceremonies tickets will be available to the public. More than 60 per cent of total tickets will be available in Canada.

Vanoc will only sell tickets inside Canada. National Olympic committees in participating countries are responsible for selling allocations of tickets in their territories, which will also begin Oct. 3.

It won't be 70 per cent across the board, though, Cobb explained. He said the proportion of seats taken up by the public and that taken by the Olympic family will vary depending on demands by the Olympic family.

However, Cobb said that no fewer than 30 per cent of any one event's tickets - even for the figure skating and hockey finals - will go to the public.

One challenge, Cobb added, was balancing all the Olympic-family requests for tickets, which in some cases exceeded the capacity of venues where events will be held. Vanoc could have filled GM Place twice over with Olympic-family members, for instance.

The allocations that Vanoc has given to the Olympic family members, which includes almost 200 constituent groups, are with the International Olympic Committee for final approval, which Cobb is confident Vanoc will receive.

He said the IOC has approved Vanoc's global allocation of 30 per cent of all tickets to the Olympic family.

"The result of it is that nobody [in the Olympic family] will get everything they ordered, especially for top events," Cobb said.

While he expects some "push-back" when groups learn what tickets they have been awarded, Cobb said the IOC and key sponsors have been supportive of Vanoc's campaign to fill every available seat and avoid some of the embarrassments that pictures of large blocks of empty seats provided at the Beijing and Turin Games.

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