Tickets for 2002 Olympic Games to Be Sold Online

Reflecting the spread of online ticket sales, Olympics officials said Friday that they will use the Internet for the first time to sell seats to the 2002 Winter Games.

U.S. and Salt Lake City Olympics organizers tapped Tickets.com Inc., a small Costa Mesa ticketing firm, to sell about 800,000 tickets to the public both online and conventionally.

The decision to sell online reflects how people increasingly are turning to cyberspace to buy seats for sports and entertainment events, from Laker games to Ricky Martin concerts and even movies.

Olympics officials said the agreement with Tickets.com would transform their ticket distribution system from archaic to cutting edge.

“This dramatically increases access,” said Mitt Romney, chief executive and president of the Salt Lake Olympic Committee. “Now you’ll go online, order, and it’s yours.”

Not that tickets to figure skating and the men’s hockey final won’t still be hard to come by. More than half of the Olympics’ 1.7 million seats are already reserved for other nations, international sports federations, the media and sponsors, organizers said. Tickets.com will handle the remaining portion.

The deal will boost the profile of Tickets.com, but won’t be a windfall for the money-losing company. Though the company valued the arrangement at as much as $8 million over 2 1/2 years, it is banking more on Olympic exposure to make it a viable competitor in an industry dominated by Ticketmaster Corp.

Ticketmaster initially competed for the contract, but dropped out because it wasn’t lucrative enough, said executives at the company’s fast-growing Internet sales arm, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch in Pasadena.

In the past, advance ticket buyers would mail in requests, often waiting months to find out if they got the seats they wanted. Ticket information appeared haphazardly. For the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, organizers printed ticket brochures and distributed them through grocery stores.

Tickets.com will supervise mail-order registration later this year. Single-ticket sales, processed either by phone or on the Internet, will start in mid-2001, company spokeswoman Helen Malani said. In 2002, fans also will be able to purchase seats at the company’s retail outlets and at a Salt Lake City box office.

The company will use lottery drawings to distribute seats when requests outnumber available tickets. It also will host ticket auctions, company executives said.

A minimum of 1,000 tickets for each Olympic session, or 20% of the seats in smaller venues, will be sold to the public, organizers said.

For Tickets.com, the Olympic link may provide a crucial boost, even if it delivers little cash.

“It’s great for the company in terms of branding,” said Christine Cassiano, the company’s investor relations manager. “That’s where its impact lies.”

The company has made only slight inroads in breaking Ticketmaster’s stranglehold on major venues. It lost $38.2 million in the first three quarters last year on sales of $33.1 million. By comparison, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch recorded $82.5 million in sales for the year ended November.

Service problems cost Tickets.com three large Bay Area clients in 1998, which translated into $9.4 million in lost revenue.

After its initial sale of stock in November, the company’s shares went up from $12.50 to as high as $32, but have faded since. The stock rose $1.50, or 9.4%, on Friday to close at $17.44 on Nasdaq.

“Having the Olympic relationship gives them some bragging rights and puts a luster on the company,” said Barry Parr, director of consumer e-commerce research at International Data Corp. in Mountain View, Calif.

The deal added another wrinkle to the company’s sometimes acrimonious relationship with Ticketmaster.

The ticket giant sued Tickets.com in July, alleging that the company links its Web site to internal pages in the Ticketmaster site and provides false or misleading information. The suit is pending.