Jet Set: Where Did They Come From?

9/24/2009

Anyone with an eye towards Olympic ticketing in the past few years has surely heard the name Jet Set or CoSport, and most likely Sead Dizdarevic as well. Dizdarevic and his two companies have become the driving force behind the marketing and sales of Olympic hospitality packages, as well as ticket sales in the United States, Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada and Sweden.

Jet Set, and sister company CoSport, are now behemoths in the world of Olympic ticketing. But at one point, Dizdarevic’s current ticketing empire was little more than a travel agency, providing some package deals to the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo.

Born on the outskirts of Sarajevo, Dizdarevic arranged for his small Staten Island travel agency to provide package tours and accommodations to his hometown for about 5,000 Americans, including the US Olympic Team. Over the next few Olympiads, up until Sydney 2000, Jet Set continued to market travel packages to the Olympics. Peter Waldman of the Wall Street Journal described Jet Set’s connection to the Olympic movement in the 1990s as being “one of several authorized ticket re-sellers who had to scramble to nail down access.”

But things began to change in 2000 when Dizdarevic officially sponsored the USOC for the Sydney Summer Olympics. Sydney 2000 gave us a look at Dizdarevic’s newest company to enter the ticket market, CoSport. Founded to handle the consumer side of Dizdarevic’s Olympic ticketing operations, CoSport has sponsored the USOC since 2000, giving it the exclusive rights to market and sell individual tickets in the United States. Now, instead of scrambling to get tickets to sell to the Olympics, CoSport was the exclusive provider of tickets for the games to US customers, guaranteeing itself an allotment of tickets and hotel rooms to market.

In preparation for Salt Lake 2002, Jet Set signed on as official hospitality sponsor for the first time, joining The Olympic Program (TOP). Started in 1985, TOP was a way for the Olympic Movement to generate greater revenue from sponsors and in turn, give them increased benefits by granting exclusivity in their respective sponsorship categories.

CoSport’s relationship with the USOC and Jet Set’s involvement in TOP meant that Dizdarevic had exclusive control over individual ticket sales in the United States and all tickets sold through corporate hospitality packages.

With newfound exclusivity in both markets, business was ready to take off. In 2002, when the Winter Games came to Salt Lake, Dizdarevic pounced. Through Jet Set and CoSport’s contracts with SLOC and the USOC, as well as various other NOCs, Dizdarevic was able to get his hands on 30% of the city’s hotel capacity and about 10% of all the tickets available to the games, or $23 million worth. When it was all said and done, the two companies made a profit of about $7 million.

The Athens 2004 Summer Olympics represented yet another leap for Dizdarevic, catering to over 15,000 clients, including a large number of VIP guests. The Athens Organizing Committee outsourced coordination of VIP guests, such as celebrities and royalty, to Jet Set. The Chief Executives Organization, an elite group of businesspeople, also turned to Jet Set for their accommodations, bringing Dizdarevic another 1,500 of the wealthiest, most exclusive clients to attend the games. With such a client base, it could hardly have been difficult to hawk multi-thousand dollar travel packages for the games.

While the size of Dizdarevic’s operation in Athens, which included cruise ships turned into floating hotels, may seem large, it was dwarfed four years later in Beijing.

In Athens, Dizdarevic hired some 400 employees to be on the ground at the games. For Beijing, Jet Set hired about 1,500 and sold some 70,000 packages, shattering its previous record of 20,000 packages set during Torino 2006. Dizdarevic spent about $130 million on Beijing, including $30 million in sponsorship fees and $15 million in tickets. Before the games began, Dizdarevic said he expected to see a profit of about $70 million on the games. In just six years, from Salt Lake 2002 to Beijing 2008, Dizdarevic had increased his profit margins nearly ten-fold.

Although Jet Set has had a relationship with the Olympic Movement for over 20 years now, it was not until the past ten years or so that his business has seen significant growth. The scope of Dizdarevic’s operations grows with every Olympiad, and he seems to secure the best premium tickets and accommodations consistently. With the Olympics’ growing popularity, tickets are more in demand now than ever before. Yet regardless of the demand for tickets, Dizdarevic seems always to be able to lock down the best of them and bundle them up with multi-star accommodation packages.

Take Vancouver 2010, for example. There are roughly 1.6 million tickets available for the games, compared to 6.5 million in Beijing. And although there are far fewer tickets available for Vancouver than there were for Beijing, Jet Set expects almost to double their business. Mark Lewis, President of Jet Set, estimated that the company would handle 150,000 to 175,000 clients. When compared to Beijing, the sheer logistics of this are perplexing.

Beijing is an enormous city, among the biggest in the world, with plenty of accommodations and almost six-times the amount of tickets available to the games than in Vancouver. Yet, even with the limited space in Vancouver and far fewer tickets available, Jet Set expects almost twice the business.

The question begged is obvious: how, when Vancouver will be roughly one-sixth the size of Beijing and more in demand than any Olympics in recent history given its location, is Dizdarevic going to secure enough tickets and hotel rooms to handle nearly double the amount of clients than in Beijing?