(ATR) The sad song over empty seats at the London Olympics is one we’ve heard before. But the chorus is louder than ever.
Who can blame British sports fans for their outrage over seeing empty seats in the Olympic venues? For more than a year, tens of thousands of them have been unsuccessful in their quest to buy tickets via the online system set up for Great Britain.
Cheap seats, expensive seats, no matter: the demand for tickets has outstripped the supply of more than six million up for grabs in the U.K. The figure represents 75 percent of the tickets up for sale.
Still, despite the sold-out factor, thousands of seats were noticeably empty as competition got underway Saturday.
These were not seats bought by Brits. These were seats held by sponsors, the IOC and the sports federations. And just as in Beijing as well as every Games before, not all of these tickets get used. Preliminary rounds of events, especially morning sessions, are often tough to fill.
But instead of simply saying something should be done about it, London 2012 organizers are trying to solve the problem.
Working with the federations and the IOC, about 3,000 tickets have been put back into the mix for British consumers to buy each day via the on-line system. None have gone begging, snapped-up as soon as they were put on sale.
While this move may help appease some disgruntled ticket-seekers, it won’t be enough to put spectators in every seat, at every event.
Large blocks of seats held by sponsors remain for now an untouchable, given the important role sponsors play in paying for the Games. Sponsors also pay plenty for tickets. Until a dynamic system can be put into place that allows for last-minute sales of seats sponsors won’t use, Olympic organizers will still face the conundrum of turning sponsor seats into ones held by flag-waving locals.
In the meantime, soldiers and school children will be pressed into service as standby spectators at venues, one of the creative solutions London 2012 will employ in the coming days.
And for those seats that are returned to the ticket pool for resale to Brits, most of those will be dearly priced, from £45 to £450. Unlike Beijing, proletarian pricing is not part of the game in Britain. And even in Beijing, people-priced tickets still were not enough to assure full venues. In fact, the no-show rate was much higher in 2008 than it is in London, where seating capacity the first few days of competition has hovered near 90 percent.
No disrespect meant to baseball and softball, two sports in Beijing but cut from London, but organizers of the 2012 Olympics must be glad they don’t have to sell 100,000 seats to those events, very foreign to British tastes.
Despite regular promises by organizers of every Games to fill all the venues, the goal remains elusive, even for a top-notch OCOG like London 2012. Soon it will be up to Sochi and Rio de Janeiro to see what they can do about it.
Written by Ed Hula
20 Years at #1: Your best source of news about the Olympics is AroundTheRings.com, for subscribers only.
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