THE CANADIAN PRESS
VANCOUVER — Canadians who don’t want to leave Olympic gold-medal hockey tickets up to lady luck can take their fortune into their own hands.
Or at least spend a fortune with their own hands by buying one of the hospitality packages that went on sale Friday for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.
For guaranteed access to tickets and hotels, the cheapest package for two people is $3,800.
Adding on transportation, meals and other goodies can send the price for two as high as $34,500.
"You’re guaranteed the events you want to see rather than going through the lottery process," said Jean-Paul Modde, the president of CoSport, the company offering the packages.
"It’s really a hassle-free way of going to the Olympics. It is quite daunting for somebody who is going to the Olympics for the very first time, it’s quite a lot of work to get from venue to venue if you’re not familiar with the process."
Individual ticket sales are handled by a five-week application process that began Oct. 3. If there’s more demand than supply, a lottery will be held to determine who gets the seats.
But for the packages, it’s first-come, first-serve.
There are 1,300 packages available, representing about 40,000 tickets of the 1.6 million on sale to the public.
Modde said sales were already brisk Friday, outpacing what they sold for the Beijing Games on the first day of package sales for those Olympics.
"They will sell out," said Modde.
The packages differ from those sold by rogue online ticket brokers in that CoSport is an official partner of the Games and has the coveted tickets others can only hope for.
"With the recent attention and warranted concern regarding unauthorized ticket agents and hospitality package providers, we want to ensure that consumers have an authorized source where they can be confident the hospitality packages they purchase are official and legitimate," Dave Cobb, vice-president of marketing for the organizing committee, said in a news release Friday..
Hotel rooms are scarce in Vancouver, with most already booked up by the organizing committee and related partners such as security and government agencies.
CoSport has so far secured rooms at three hotels and hopes to be allocated a few more.
"A lot of companies have to go through companies like ourselves to get hotel rooms," Modde said.
Packages run from simple hotel-and-ticket bundles to others that include transportation, hospitality and meals.
For example, $6,284.50 per person buys four days and three nights in the River Rock Casino resort in Richmond, B.C., which is near the speedskating venue.
That package includes a ticket to the finals of men’s and women’s short track, men’s gold-medal curling, men’s gold-medal hockey and the closing ceremony.
There are also flex packages, which let people to select which events they’d like.
.Modde said the most popular packages are usually the ones at the end of the Olympics with all the final events.
The organizing committee is offering its own packages to the Games, but those are only ticket bundles and don’t include accommodations.
CoSport also manages individual ticket sales in the United States, Austria, Sweden and Australia for the Games.
Demand for individual tickets was highest in the northwestern United States, said Modde, and the most popular events remain ice hockey and figure skating.
He said the economic downturn doesn’t appear to be having any impact yet.
"Clearly, some people may have some second thoughts," he said.
"Certainly from the demand we’ve seen, firstly in the ticket request and now in the packages over the last few days, we haven’t seen that to be a big factor at this stage."
Packages are only for sale through CoSport’s website.
