SEATTLE (AP) — Heather Bailey gave up. After a year spent pursuing tickets to February’s Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics through official sources, the Expedia employee from Federal Way will put her dreams of attending a rare close-to-home Olympics in the hands of scalpers.
Jim Jeffreys got lucky — sort of. The Seattle school administrator landed $2,100 worth of Olympic tickets, then struggled to find a way to use them in a city where basic hotels are charging more than $1,000 a night.
Ed Dooley got mad. After scoring four tickets, then giving up on lodging, the retired chief financial officer from Sequim spent the better part of a year writing letters and making angry phone calls about an Olympic ticketing and accommodations system he calls a classic, unregulated monopoly.
Dooley’s conclusion: “I think they’re a bunch of bandits.”
Welcome to the dark side of the Olympic flame. The Games get lofty billing as a celebration of human achievement — an amateur sports event that builds community and transcends class barriers. It seemed a natural fit for progressive Vancouver, where organizers promised the most fan-friendly Games ever.
The truth: The public will be a bit player in the made-for-TV drama unfolding in Vancouver and Whistler.
Consider: —In spite of record demand, fans seeking tickets to premier events such as medal-round hockey games will have access to only about one-quarter of the seats normally available in Vancouver’s 19,000-seat General Motors Place. Sponsors, media and VIPs take the lion’s share.
—Frustrated Northwest fans, who produced the largest ticket demand outside Canada, are lucky to have landed any tickets at all. Only 2 percent of the 1.6 million total about 35,000 tickets were initially reserved by Vancouver organizers for the U.S. public. For the gold-medal men’s hockey game, America got 76 seats.
—Fans lucky enough to get tickets can find themselves frozen out on lodging. The 20,000 most-desirable hotel rooms in Vancouver and Whistler were set aside long ago for corporate sponsors and other officials — at relative bargain prices.
—One private travel monopoly, CoSport/Jet Set Sports of New Jersey, was granted nearly three times as many tickets as the U.S. general public. The companies place many of those tickets in luxury hotel packages that range from about $5,000 per person into the millions of dollars for corporate clients.
All of this leaves athletes’ families, as in past Olympics, battling for the few remaining rooms and extra tickets when prices peak, just before the Feb. 12-28 Games.
