Journalists, Olympic sponsors and officials will be staying in about 20,000 hotel rooms within two hours of Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Games. The rooms represent about 60 per cent of available rooms. Of the remaining rooms, some have been set aside only for guests willing to stay a certain number of nights or for those buying Olympic packages that include lodging. In other cases, the rooms are being held by hotels that will release them at some point before the Olympics, most likely at higher prices. The Salt Lake Organizing Committee, through Coldwell Banker Premier, is marketing private homes and condominiums as rentals to help supplement the city’s supply of hotel rooms. Private residences cost from $150 to more than $3,000 per night, condominiums are $200 to about $550 per night, and Coldwell Canker takes 40 per cent of the proceeds, while homeowners receive the rest. In some cases Olympic visitors are booking hotel rooms a good distance from the venues.
The Salt Lake Organizing Committee has proposed cutting $10 off the round-trip ticket from Salt Lake City to Olympic mountain venues, because its worried that its proposed bus fares could drive away transit users. But even the reduced price of $20 is far more than other Games have charged. According to SLOC Chief Operating Officer Fraser Bullock, a fare in the $20 to $30 range has always been planned for the long-haul bus system that will transport ticket holders from Ogden, Salt Lake City and Provo. About half of all spectators are expected to drive to park-and-ride lots and take a free shuttle to events. An additional five per cent to seven per cent are expected to use the Mountain Venue Express. At $20 SLOC hopes to achieve its ridership goal and raise about $600,000 of the estimated $1 million it will cost to operate the buses.
The grand prize of The U.S. Olympic Team “Gold Medal” Sweepstakes, which was launched on August 1, is a trip for two to the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Winter Games. The promotion is supported by an ad campaign in USA TODAY, USOC publications, USOC E-mail database and USOC partner web sites. The ads instruct consumers to visit www.usolympicteam.com where they can click on a promotional button linked to a short registration form that enters participants into the sweepstake. An incentivized Tell-A-Friend referral program is also incorporated into the promotion, where sweepstakes entrants can send an E-mail directly to friends about the promotion and earn themselves additional sweepstakes entries. Fans can enter each day and get up to five additional entries each day by referring new friends. There are also 10 second prizes including $100 shopping sprees at the online U.S. Olympic store and 50 third-place prizes of Official U.S. Olympic Team T-Shirts. The promotion ends August 31, 2001.
The Athens organizing committee is setting Olympic records for money raised from national sponsors three years before competition begins at the 2004 Games, even though Greece is the smallest country to host the Summer Games in 50 years. The $200 million, pledged through late July, is remarkable because the Athens organizers have limited the number of sponsors, in an attempt to avoid the accusations of overcommercialization that dogged the Atlanta Games in 1996. Organizers said the strong performance in recruiting was attributed in part to the marketing theme of “bringing the Games home” to the birthplace of the Olympics. The $200 million committed for the first six sponsorships awarded equals the amount the committee had hoped to get from all 40 categories. The national sponsors provide money and services to the organizing committee in exchange for the right to use the blue-and-white wreath and Olympic five-ring logo in advertising and permission to sell products and services at the Games. The Athens committee originally expected to raise $500 million of its $1.7 billion budget through sponsorships and licensing, but the revenue total will probably be much higher.
And finally, Athens 2004 organizers said that all private vehicles will be banned from approaching venues, and spectators and staff at the 2004 Games will only be able to travel to and from sports events on public transportation. An extra 400,000 to 500,000 trips are expected to be made daily within Athens during the Games. There are now about 4.7 million trips conducted daily within the capital during the summer. Organizers are studying plans under which the approach and parking of all private cars would be banned six-tenths of a mile from each venue. Spectators, staff and volunteers working for the Games will have to use the metro, trolleys and buses, as well as a planned tram and suburban railway line. Neither the tram nor the rail line has yet been built. There are also plans to create new express bus lines connecting Olympic venues with central Athens locations, and to create a “park-and-ride’ system, with buses ferrying spectators from large parking lots to be created about 2-1/2 miles away from venues. Organizers are examining proposals to incorporate public transportation tickets in the price of entry fees for Olympic events and issuing employees and volunteers for the Games with monthly travel cards. About 4.2 million people are expected to buy tickets for the Olympics and another 450,000 for the Paralympics, while about 160,000 staff and volunteers will work at the Games and a further 40,000 at the Paralympics.
