With the Olympics coming up, and a slight possibility that I might be in town for the Games I was interested in finding out the prices of tickets for various events (although expecting less than good news). Well, if you were looking for tickets to the Gold Medal round of the Men’s Ice Hockey event you could possibly be looking at $16,500 per seat according to the highest bids on the official Olympics ticket scalping site. Of course, they refer to it as simply the “Fan-to-Fan” section of the ticketing section of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics official website.
Here is the screenshot:
(You can click on the image to enlarge it)
Absurd. The face value of the tickets is $775 each, but organizers have decided to set up this “fan-to-fan” ticket marketplace so people can still try to get tickets. Sure they are hot commodities, and no one is forcing you to pay the asking prices, and if they didn’t set it up scalpers and ticket brokers would do this anyways.
VANOC is collecting 10% of the sale price from BOTH the seller and they buyer. So if someone snags these tickets from the picture above not only will VANOC have collected $1,550 (original sale price for 2 x $775 tickets), they will have collected an additional $6,000 from the fees for providing the fan-to-fan marketplace.
That assumes that someone is crazy enough to shell out that kind of money. Just because someone is posting it at that price doesn’t mean it will sell.
Nonetheless, this is certainly a controversial service. I wonder if it comes with sippy-cups made of unobtanium…
I was thinking of snaring a few tickets, but you talked me out of it.
Regards,
Is it possible to short hockey tickets?
@Michael James – if only… :)
Market pressures at work, it’s just like the stock market!
If the final ends up being Sweden vs. Latvia, I bet you get the tickets very cheap the day of the game (but then you would have had to pay for a hotel room in Vancouver, which are not cheap either).
This is one of the major problems of the Olympics. It is an event for the uber-rich and not available to most Canadians.
Stay home everyone and watch it on CBC online like I am!
I tried buying the tickets online when they first came out, I put a bid on four tickets and did not win. the total price for 4 tickets to the mens gold medal hockey game was close to $5000, which I thought was expensive, guess I was wrong
Really? Wow… that’s crazy! Oh well… TV is free.
The final going price I found was $38,000 on ebay.
I have screen shots here
http://www.spendadollar.info/2010/02/16/mens-olympic-hockey-tickets-only-38000/