Lessons from Beijing Still Not Learned?

On October 3, the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) began accepting requests for tickets to the 2008 Winter Olympics in Canada. At the same time, CoSport, the official ticket seller for the U.S. Olympic Committee as well as the Olympics Committees in Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, and Sweden, among others, also began taking requests. Both claimed to have learned valuable lessons from the ticketing fiasco that took place with the Summer Olympics in Beijing. But early indications are that while some lessons do appear to have been learned, others that are more valuable have been ignored, opening the door to ticketing problems that could mirror those seen in Beijing.

In fact, some of the promises made by VANOC seem to echo those made early on by the Beijing Organizing Committee, when it claimed it would be diligent in protecting ticket buyers against fraud. The Chinese focused much of their attention on traditional ticket scalpers and ticket counterfeiters, but did little to police internet ticket brokers - even though a huge number of the tickets sold to the Summer Olympics were sold over the internet. And in the end, it was scam ticket sites such as beijingticketing.com that caused the most trouble, dashing the hopes of those who had carefully planned a once-in-a-lifetime event. To a lesser degree, otherwise reputable online ticket brokers also caused problems, promising tickets they didn't actually have and ultimately were unable to obtain, much to the distress of those who had depended on them.

But while internet ticket sales were at the center of the worst Summer Olympics ticketing problems, so far VANOC has done little to deal with the issue other than tell people to use only official Olympics ticketing sites. While that may be good advice, it's questionable just how practical it is. Scam sites can easily look official. And there are non-official, but otherwise legitimate, travel sites that have provided Olympics-goers exactly what they were promised. Good advice aside, there are some clear issues that the organizers of the Winter Olympics have yet to address. Some of the more obvious are the following:

Creating Better Websites – As more than one observer has pointed out, a major reason that many hopeful Olympics ticket buyers ended up at scam websites is that they were frustrated by the official Olympics ticketing sites. In his analysis of the official CoSport website versus the scam website created for beijingticketing.com, internet-marketing expert Christian Vuong noted that the scam site was much easier to navigate through, offered more information about individual events, and in general just made it easier for people to buy tickets than did the Olympics' official ticketing site. Unfortunately, while the CoSport website for the Winter Olympics is a little better than the one for the Summer Olympics that Vuong analyzed, it still has a number of the problems he identified. Tickets are still unavailable on the home page, with hopeful buyers being directed to a second site that is at best complicated, and at worst frustrating and confusing. And the CoSport home page is still as much about CoSport as it is about the Olympics, giving considerable information about how great the company is while pushing basic questions about tickets and ticketing to a second site. VANOC's website is much better, providing a great deal more ticketing and event information and being considerably easier to understand. Unfortunately, only Canadians can use it to buy tickets.

Keeping an Eye on Google – A big factor in many of those looking for tickets to the Summer Olympics ending up at non-official websites is that the internet search engine Google led them there. If a recent Google search is any indication, that could happen with the Winter Olympics as well. Few Olympics ticket buyers are likely to know the exact URL of the official Olympics ticketing sites. Instead, they'll look for the sites the same way people look for other websites every day, by doing a Google search. When they did so for Summer Olympics tickets, the first names to pop up were often scam websites. The official sites tended to be buried deep in the listings. And for U.S. ticket buyers anyway, they still are. A Google search for "Winter Olympics Tickets" done a few weeks after ticket requests for the Winter Olympics began to be accepted showed the VANOC site to be high on the list - although behind ads for two non-official travel sites. The CoSport site, in contrast, wasn't even on the first page of results - or the second, or the third. But if CoSport was almost impossible to find, Ticket City, an Austin, Texas-based company that was sued by the Texas Attorney General for selling Beijing Opening Ceremony tickets they allegedly didn't have, was easy to locate, being right behind the VANOC listing. While Ticket City - apparently a legitimate ticketing and travel site that in the case of the Summer Olympics allegedly failed to follow through on promises to customers - are quite different from purely fraudulent ticketing sites such as beijingticketing.com, Google still makes no distinction between them, possibly fraudulent sites, and official Olympics ticketing sites. As a result, it's still easy for potential ticket buyers to be misled, and so far neither VANOC nor USOC, nor Google for that matter, seems to have come up with a solution to the problem, or even seriously addressed it.

Aiming at the Wrong Target – When the Chinese talked about protecting those who wanted to buy tickets to the Beijing Olympics, they aimed much of their attention at things such as counterfeit tickets, when the real problem was counterfeit ticketing websites. What they should have been concerned about, as it happened, was not so much people buying fake tickets as people buying tickets that they never received because they never even existed. In the case of the Winter Olympics, VANOC has talked quite a bit about policing the Olympic "family" - sponsors and others who receive guaranteed tickets to Olympic events - to make sure that they don't sell their tickets to ticket brokers who would then pass them along, at a profit, to the general public. Given the number of empty seats at events in Beijing, seats allocated to Olympic "family" and others and then passed along to nobody, this seems a curious issue to focus on. In Beijing the problem was not too many people getting official tickets through un-official channels, but instead people getting no tickets at all, despite paying for them.

In China, the ultimate problem was that the officials behind the Summer Olympics failed to protect the average ticket-buyer, allowing them to fall victim to scams and other problems they could have helped prevent. The question is whether the officials behind the Winter Olympics, or the 2012 Summer Games in London, will do better. So far VANOC has done a superior job of warning people of the risks they take when using non-official ticketing websites, but beyond that there's little indication that they've learned much from Beijing. Monitoring Google to see if suspect Olympics ticketing sites rise to the top of the search list, and then taking action against them, might be one useful course of action. Helping make sure that reporters don't end up promoting fake websites, as MSNBC famously did, could be another. Although for the Winter Olympics it's likely too late to do much about the poor quality of official ticketing websites such as CoSport, that's something that could be addressed for the 2012 Summer Games.

The Olympics Organizing Committees have done a lot in the past to protect their brands when it comes to commercial infringement. What they haven't done is much to protect that brand when it comes to infringement on prospective ticket buyers. So far about the most they've offered is a warning to be careful. VANOC is saying that louder now, which is good. But it can hardly be considered enough.