Crazy Prices for Sports Events
June 7, 2010
As the football world cup gets under way this weekend in South Africa this weekend the world will be watching with interest to see mainly how the country copes with the tens of thousands of football supporters descending on their beautiful country. I truly hope its an enormous success that galvanises the country to go on to bigger and greater things as it really is an great place to visit. I believe it will show to the world that it can organise, build and successfully manage such a prestigious event; but it will have been let down by the over greedy governing body, in this case FIFA or its tournament spin-off, MATCH. It is MATCH that centrally controlled virtually all of the accommodation available in South Africa promising hoteliers full rooms for a month or more at high prices. However it is also MATCH that has been releasing in some cases as much at 70% of the rooms unsold with only weeks to go before the tournament having failed to fill them at prices sometimes three times higher as the high season prices. To take this to conclusion, UK based official agents like Thomas Cook for instance ended up offering 5 night packages to see England play USA for £2500 which they later reduced to £970 just to get some adequate take up. Similarly, Events International trip to the World Cup Final is reduced from £7999 to £4999 this weekend, some saving! We arent so active in football but the Rugby World Cup is in severe danger of heading in the same direction, putting off willing travellers or pushing them towards doing it themselves - indeed why wouldnt you faced with these prices? A 3 week trip with England Rugby Travel to see the quarters through to the final currently costs over £8000 per person (plus tickets)! We sold this same holiday to Australia in 2003 (when England were somewhat better than they are now) for less than £3000 plus the cost of the match tickets. Aren’t we supposed to be emerging from a global recession? Hotels we are talking to either think they are full because the official agents have placed bookings with them or are charging between 4 times and in one case 8 times their normal prices. I don’t blame anyone for trying to do make a little bit of profit but it just seems to have got completely out of hand.
We would rather not be involved in offering packages at such incredibly high prices and we beilive that prices will only fall over time. We are using our contacts to come up with some alternatives as best we can at prices we are more comfortable with, otherwise we will actually advise keen rugby fans to just hold off and see what happens. To me, prices for this trip will go only one way - down. We hope to offer our supporters packages sub-£4000 that will enable fans to follow their country for up to 17 nights whilst still enjoying the camaradary that goes with a great tour like this. Watch this space for more news…..
Having said - I should add that not every supplier is completely greedy and we would like to give a big thumbs up to those that are fair both in terms of their pricing and the payment terms. Awards this week go to Trailways Motel in Nelson and the Kaikoura Whale watching people, both of whom have merely increased their prices slightly since 2005.
Comment by Patrick — July 30, 2010 @ 12:54 pm
As time goes by I am really happy to be able to add that more and more we are finding airlines and hotels are realising that the demand they were expecting cannot sustain such crazily high prices and slowly but surely prices are coming down.
Long may it continue.
Comment by Patrick — October 18, 2010 @ 10:57 pm