O.C. Company to Sell Olympic Tickets Online

Olympic organizers in Salt Lake City said Friday they will offer tickets to the Games over the Internet for the first time and have tapped a small Costa Mesa ticketing firm to sell about 800,000 seats to the public.

Reflecting the spread of online ticketing sales, U.S. and Salt Lake City Olympic organizers said they will use Tickets.com Inc. for selling both online and conventionally for the 2002 Winter Games.

The decision to sell online shows 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. At the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim, General Manager Tim Ryan said Internet sales are “growing at an exponential rate.”

Olympic officials said the agreement with Tickets.com will 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 City 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 Olympic fortnight’s 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, which began online sales in 1997. But it won’t be a financial windfall for the money-losing company. Although the company valued the arrangement at up to $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’s fast-growing Internet sales arm, Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch in Pasadena, initially competed for the contract, but dropped out because it wasn’t lucrative enough, said executives at the online firm.

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 up 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 random 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 lost $72.4 million on sales of $68.9 million during the first nine months of last year.

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 shot up from $12.50 to as high as $32, but have faded since. The stock rose $1.50, or 9.4%, on Friday to $17.44.

“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. “My guess is these guys would be willing to lose money on Olympic tickets if it got people from around the world to come to their Web site.”

The deal added another wrinkle to the company’s at-times acrimonious relationship with Ticketmaster.

The ticket giant sued Tickets.com in July, alleging the Costa Mesa outfit links its Web site visitors to internal pages within the Ticketmaster site and provides false or misleading information. Tickets.com denies any wrongdoing. The lawsuit is pending.

Executives at Ticketmaster’s online partner said the Olympic Committee wanted too high a price for its sponsorship. Ticketmaster prefers to lock in long-term, five- to seven-year deals with venues that host numerous events year-round, said Tom McInerney, the chief financial officer of the Pasadena company.

“Our securing of ticketing rights to the Staples Center last year was far more important to the company from an economic perspective than the Olympic contract would be,” he said.

As both the entertainment and sports industries have grown in recent years, so too has the demand for easier ways to buy and sell tickets. Advances in technology have overcome complications that made ticketing software tough to develop, said Eugene Carr, president of the online ticketing company CultureFinder.com in New York.

“Ticketing on the Internet is a phenomenon that began in 1999 and is taking off like a rocket,” Carr said. CultureFinder’s sales, for instance, grew 120% just from the third quarter to the fourth last year, he said.

“People are finally realizing that finding out about events and then, in two clicks, buying tickets is easier than going to a box office, picking up the telephone or poring through a newspaper,” Carr said.

MovieFone Inc., which sells movie tickets over the Internet and telephone, saw online sales jump 57% last year as more than 3 million moviegoers reserved seats by computer rather than line up at the box office.

Internet sales have skyrocketed in the last two years for events at the Arrowhead Pond, Ryan said.

“Fans still love to come to the front of our facility and buy tickets, but the number of tickets being sold over the Internet is doubling, and then doubling again,” he said.

*

Times staff writer Randy Lewis contributed to this story.