(ATR) The results are in from the first attempt at offering a ticket and hospitality program to Olympic fans on a global basis.
The PyeongChang Organizing Committee for the 2018 Olympic & Paralympic Winter Games (POCOG) selected Jet Set Sports to flesh out the concept of the New Horizons Hospitality Program. It was created to both support POCOG’s ticketing program and enhance the spectator experience.
The program combined premium tickets with access to both the New Horizons Lounge in Gangneung Olympic Park and in-venue hospitality lounges.
Jet Set Sports co-CEO Alan Dizdarevic tells Around the Rings that the initial effort in PyeongChang "went well for us".
"We anticipated this to be a low attended event, you know a Winter Games, so we were able to acquire assets kind of related to that and so the games went as expected but the experience I think exceeded expectations of all of the guests," Dizdarevic said.
Jet Set Sports leveraged its experience of providing hospitality for 19 Olympic Games to develop the program and design the New Horizons Lounge.
"I give a lot of credit to POCOG and the IOC for even being on board with pursuing something like this and I think it’s a great way to introduce a new spectator experience for the games," Dizdarevic says.
He adds that the company is looking forward to having more time to prepare and sell the product ahead of Tokyo 2020.
"We’re going to start much earlier than we had the opportunity here because here we basically only had about four and a half to five months to sell the product. So I would say the timeline was really the biggest challenge for us at the end of the day."
Dizdarevic believes an 18 to 24 month lead period before the next Games would be a much better time frame, especially given the differences between a Winter Games in PyeongChang and a Summer Games in Tokyo.
"With no two Olympic cities being alike there has to be an education process around all of this because the concept for Tokyo will most likely be different than the concept here," Dizdarevic says, explaining that while the New Horizons Lounge was in the Gangneung Olympic Park "in Tokyo there’s no Park there".
He envisions "multiple centralized locations" throughout Tokyo that would each include a hospitality component combined with multiple sporting venues.
For Jet Set Sports, the PyeongChang endeavor has been an opportunity for the company to show people what it can do.
"We’ve been able to show to the international public and to various members of the Olympic family kind of what we really do," Dizdarevic says. "And also that it is a concept that can work, that it is something for the future and not just a one shot deal."
Written by Gerard Farekin Gangneung
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