A chance remark during Olympic coverage alerted me to the fact that ticket prices might be high. A little looking provided this relatively accessible link. Up to five levels of tickets are available; in many venues only four levels apply. To give two examples, here is Swimming and Hockey:
Swimming | Final | £450 | £295 | £185 | £95 | £50 |
Hockey | Final | £150 | £95 | £65 | £45 |
All venues may be seen at the link. Today’s conversion rate indicates that £1 = $1.57. Therefore the best price for the swimming finals is $706.50 per person. As for the opening and closing ceremonies, the Opening Ceremony (best seat) was £2,012 ($3,159), the Closing Ceremony will run £1,500 ($2,355).
Much more detail is available from another site (link), but it is rather cumbersome to use. Detailed listings reveal how ticket prices vary based on the sport’s popularity or prestige (e.g. Dressage), also that on the whole women’s sports produce a lower ticket prices than men’s.
This is somewhat reassuring. When we first spoke about this and you mentioned seeing a reference to ticket pricing being in the $700 range, I was aghast. However, seeing that tickets are available in a more reasonable range for most events... high but more reasonable is a bit reassuring.
ReplyDeleteWhat seems to be occurring with more frequency these days is the multiplying of the tiers of pricing for such events. In the past, it seems there were maybe three tiers, high, medium and low. Now one often sees five, six or even more pricing levels including the truly high, the luxury box level which helps those who want maximum luxury and division from the masses achieve their goal.
I saw an odd case of this tiered pricing recently at Cedar Point, the big roller coaster park in Sandusky, OH. For a premium price, and I mean premium as in an EXTRA $65 a head, those who plenty of money who do not wish to wait around in line with everyone else can buy a special arm bracelets that lets you "cut to the front." You can imagine how well that goes over as these cut-to-the-front types walk by you after you've been waiting in a long, hot, slowly moving line for an hour...
That Cedar Point pricing is atrocious. That brings out the worst instincts of everybody! It is almost an instinct to despise people who break into lines, and hating others is not good for you. So the park is causing trouble all around. But, as you pointed out, this was not your kind of place...
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