Peninsula Daily News news sources
The last chance to secure tickets to watch many of the events of the 2010 Winter Olympics — up to Wednesday deemed sold out for all events in both Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia — will come next week, news media in Canada and the Pacific Northwest were informed Wednesday night.
CoSport, the exclusive U.S. ticketing agency for the Feb. 12-28 Olympics, announced that it had come up with nearly 40,000 more tickets, including some for unspecified “high-demand” events.
Those tickets will go on sale online at 11 a.m. Pacific time on May 14, at http://www.cosport.com. They’ll be sold on a first-come, first-served basis, only to buyers who have established an account on the Web site before 6 a.m. the same day.
When they’re gone, they’re gone, The Seattle Times reported Wednesday night.
The size of the additional ticket allotment was a surprise — it’s almost as large as CoSport’s original U.S. share of 48,000 individual tickets sold late last year.
Officials from CoSport, which has exclusive U.S. sales rights through a contract with the U.S. Olympic Committee, said the tickets came from two sources: an additional allotment from the Vancouver Organizing Committee, likely from tickets that went unsold in other countries; and a transfer of tickets from Jet Set Sports, CoSport’s parent company, which deals in pricey, all-inclusive Olympic travel packages.
The new ticket inventory is “a very strong cross-section” of sports, said Mark Lewis, Jet Set’s president. “There are a lot of high-demand events, and medal events themselves, not just preliminaries. A good number will be sold on the first day.”
Because of record-high ticket demand in Canada, the original 48,000-ticket U.S. allotment for individual (non-travel-package) buyers was only about 3 percent of the Games’ total 1.6 million tickets.
A second sale of remaining tickets — conducted online Feb. 5, only for buyers who had registered for the first ticket sale — proved disastrous. Tens of thousands of buyers essentially crashed the CoSport Web site in the scramble.
U.S. prices for Games tickets through CoSport, which adds a premium of about 30 percent above the face value of tickets sold in Canada, range (depending on seat quality) from $54 and $114 for the 4-man bobsled final to $135 and $200 for the men’s downhill and $678 and $930 for the gold-medal hockey match. That’s assuming any of those are still available. Having the tickets mailed, rather than waiting at will call in Vancouver, costs extra — $35 in previous sales.
Those prices are a bargain compared with third-party sales prices in Canada, where scalping Web sites are legal, and tickets for opening ceremonies are advertised at $3,000 to $5,000 (Canadian) apiece, while women’s figure skating tickets fetch $400 to $1,500 Canadian.
The Canadian dollar, or looney, is trading at about 80 percent of the U.S. dollar.
Customers can preregister for the May 14 sale at www.cosport.com/country.aspx.
