The 2010 Olympic Tickets Game – VANOC vs Ticket Brokers
With the highly contested 2010 Olympic Ticket Lottery now over, VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Games) has followed up with a banner ad campaign on Vancouver Sun’s web site reminding Olympic ticket hopefuls to “BE SURE YOUR OLYMPIC TICKETS COME FROM AN OFFICIAL SOURCE“. The Committee maintains their intention is to protect fans from buying counterfeit tickets which I imagine is partly true, but another, perhaps bigger motive of the ad blitz is to discourage the success of a secondary grey market from profiting off the public at inflated prices.
Right now VANOC has a few things working in its favour to get a jump start on the secondary market:
1. Tickets have been allocated more than a full year ahead of the events. The urgency is not there for a ticket buyer to get them immediately.
2. Hard copy tickets are not being issued and delivered until December 2009. Although the physical ticket is transferable once in someone’s hand, it is tougher to sell a ticket you won’t receive for 11 months. Various ticket brokers are currently working on legal contracts that will bind the seller to the sale once tickets are issued, but something tells me the legal work going on behind the deals on Craigslist holds little more than that a handshake.
3. Vanoc has openly stated that they will void any tickets that they learn to have been sold at a higher price than face value. This is absolutely ludicrous and I can’t see it being much more than verbal warfare against scalping. Are they going to hire ticket narc’s to pretend to buy tickets at a higher price and then void them? This borders on insanity, but shows the lengths they are willing to go in deterring a scalper’s market.
At www.2010tracker.com we are monitoring the market for 2010 Olympic Tickets and will report regularly as well as offer insight and comparisons on the various ticket brokers for sellers and buyers.
