Examination of Witnesses (Questions 180-184)
LORD COE,
MR PAUL
DEIGHTON, MR
JOHN ARMITT
AND MR
DAVID HIGGINS
9 DECEMBER 2008
Q180 Mr Evans: Can we deal briefly
with touting and ways to prevent it? If you have a considerable
number of low price tickets will you be using technology such
as mobile phones so that people get their tickets sent electronically
to make sure they are the ones who use them?
Mr Deighton: In terms of managing
touting I am not sure that we would use that particular technology.
In my view one of the best defences against touting goes back
to the overall ticket distribution strategy. If you are able to
distribute tickets initially very broadly to the real fans who
will come it is very hard for a tout to get hold of tickets in
the secondary market. To me, that is the fundamental way to manage
the problem. On top of that, it is illegal to sell tickets to
the Olympic Games at a premium as it is for Premiership football.
Therefore, we have the law on our side. We shall be monitoring
activity in a very intensive way with the security services. Most
of the activity tends to happen online and there are very sophisticated
ways to manage that. We have just seen the arrest and prosecution
of five people by the Serious Fraud Office of a Beijing ticket
scam. We shall be aggressive about hunting them down.
Q181 Mr Evans: Will you use the clubs
and organisations, the real fans, as a way of distributing tickets?
Mr Deighton: Yes. What our team
is working on at the moment across the 26 sports is to understand
where the core fans are for each of them and make sure we are
driving our marketing into those long-term holders of tickets
who we know will be there. One problem in Beijing was that in
preliminary rounds there were empty seats. Tickets were distributed
right around the country at very low prices really for political
purposes. If you are in Mongolia you just stick it on the wall
and keep it as a souvenir because there is no way that you will
go to Beijing. People wonder why they did not show up. Obviously,
we do not have quite the same issue here, but I think that the
principle of initially getting the ticket into the hands of the
real fan and having a marketing strategy to enable you to do that
is the best defence you have against touting and empty seats.
Lord Coe: There are 1,600 athletic
clubs alone and they represent an extraordinary base with which
to work.
Q182 Mr Evans: If you want to see
the Olympics join a club now?
Lord Coe: That could be a serious
message.
Q183 Paul Farrelly: Clearly, the
Olympics are not the same sort of knock-out tournament as the
previous Rugby World Cup in Paris, but there the French organisers
and IRB had no mechanism by which people could legitimately on
an authorised basis say that they did not want the tickets and
sell them on to people who wanted them. It is illegal to sell
them on.
Mr Deighton: It is illegal to
sell them on at a profit.
Q184 Paul Farrelly: Notwithstanding
that, it will still be important to have some sort of authorised
mechanism by which people who do not need tickets can hand them
in and make them available to those who do want them?
Lord Coe: How do they come back
into the system legally?
Mr Deighton: We are working on
putting in place a ticket exchange that will allow for that because
we agree with you that it is the missing piece. One of the other
matters on which we are working—I was at Wimbledon the other
week—is to have technology in place to scan the tickets
of those who leave early and resell them. It fills seats but it
also allows people to have a source of cheap tickets.
Lord Coe: And alerts people.
Mr Deighton: Yes. In that respect
we will use technology so we can tell people that if they turn
up at x in five minutes they can have fencing tickets.
That is the kind of thing on which we are working. We will also
shorten sessions. In Beijing there was, for example, a five-hour
beach volleyball session. For some people that might be heaven
but it is a long time to sit watching one event. We will probably
not extend an event beyond two and a half hours and then we will
have more chance of a backside being on a seat for the whole session.
Chairman: We must call a halt at this
point in order to move on. I thank all of you very much.
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