VANOC launches resale site.

12/22/09

VANOC has finally rolled out its long awaited ticket resale site for fans to use. The website, administered and designed by VANOC, will allow fans to enter an online marketplace and resell their tickets to events they will not be attending.

The world noticed a surprising amount of empty seats to the 2008 Beijing games where record demand was not necessarily met by record attendance.

A ticket resale site is a great way to cut down on unused tickets and ensure that true fans get a chance to attend the games. In fact, VANOC makes these claims to justify setting up the site. But the execution of this one leaves much to be desired.

For starters, the resale site will only be open to Canadian residents, though international customers may purchase tickets, they just cannot sell them. Ticket sellers will continue to hold onto their original tickets, opening a possible avenue to all sorts of fraudulent ticket activity.

Hardly surprising, the ticket exchange will also put money right back into VANOC’s pocket: a 20% cut from each sale will go to the organizing committee. Not only will VANOC take a percentage, but they will not put a price cap on tickets. VANOC can now sell the same ticket twice and as a result of commission, get just as much money from a resale, perhaps more, as from the original sale.

Caley Denton, VP of ticketing and consumer marketing, claims such fees are to cover administrative costs. This is a valid point. But the fact that VANOC will not place a cap on their take, meaning they will take 20% regardless of whether it is a $10 or $100 transaction makes this claim almost laughable. If the program really were to cover costs, there would be no need to take 20% past a certain amount.

The resale site marks a significant departure from the committee’s initial stance against ticket resale, in which they claimed that no tickets could be resold and those that were ‘scalped’ would be invalidated.

At least, that was their stance until the committee realized that if it they regulated the scalping they could make some money in the process. Apparently, the anti-scalping stance was not just for consumer protection. While VANOC encourages those to use their resale site to ensure the validity of tickets, as opposed to those procured from other sites on the internet, threats to invalidate secondary market tickets have tapered off.

In perhaps the most shocking (or most expected) move, VANOC will also be auctioning off the best seats in the house to high-demand events. Tickets to hockey semi-finals, finals, figure skating events, and the snowboard halfpipe competition will be auctioned off to “whomever has the most credit on their VISA card.”

In an economic downturn with most everyone in the world cutting back on expenses, you might think that VANOC would make some efforts to ensure equal access to the games. These are, after all, the world’s games, no?

It seems that now they are not so much the world’s games as they are the games of the wealthy.