[ad_1]
AUGUSTA, Georgia – For about two decades, James DiZoglio has run a bazaar to sell some of the most popular tickets in the sport. His scalping location has always been the same: near the TBonz Steakhouse and the Augusta Best Inn down the street from the Masters site.
But the traditional Jimmy D’s Tickets space along Washington Road has been empty this week. There are no spectators at the Upset Pandemic Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club, and so there are no valuable badges to sell to future clients, as fans are known at the Masters, for maybe $ 2,000. each.
“The Masters is really, in my opinion, the biggest ticket in the world,” said DiZoglio, who estimated that around 40 percent of its activity comes from this tournament, the only major golf tournament held each year in the world. same club. “It is a once in a lifetime event for a lot of people.”
This week typically draws affluent couples, elderly men with their middle-aged sons on pilgrimages, corporate titans, budding moguls and many more to parking lots, tents and hotel rooms transformed into offices so they can pay thousands of dollars. for daily tickets with a face value of $ 75 or $ 115.
Now they are gone, their absences are a symptom of the crisis in the secondary ticketing industry this year: with so few live events – and fans for the most part are excluded from those that do happen – there are even fewer tickets to sell. Since the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold of the United States in March, just before the baseball season and NCAA basketball tournaments, many brokers have seen their incomes drop sharply. At the same time, they have had to deal with demands for repayment, which has strained their balance sheets and prompted them to turn to layoffs, time off and emergency grants and loans.
“Everyone is trying to navigate this trail and stay in business so that when the industry returns they will be able to go back to what they used to do,” said Gary Adler, Executive Director of the National Association of Ticket. Brokers.
The discomfort associated with the Masters goes far beyond the ticket office. The Augusta region has traditionally relied on the tournament for a multi-million dollar infusion to support hotels, restaurants, as well as bars and their employees.
This year, hotel rooms that are normally sold out during the Master are vacant, available for less than $ 100 a night. Walk into some restaurants in downtown Augusta along the Savannah River, and you might find less than a dozen patrons in the height of dinner time. Traffic is hardly a problem.
And there is no ticket vendor in sight to make deals or make sure existing deals run smoothly.
“A typical week would be to be out in the field and be there for my clients,” said Amy Stephens, who said her company, Amy’s Tickets, gets about half of its income from working with the Masters.
“It’s stressful and difficult and we don’t get much sleep,” she added. “But it’s just the best week. Everyone who comes to the Masters is happy. “
Yet even before the pandemic, the larger secondary ticketing industry was facing pressure, in part due to declining attendance at some sports and an increase in direct sales from teams and event organizers. . TicketIQ, which tracks resale data, found, for example, that nearly two million NFL tickets were offered on the secondary market in 2013. In 2019, that number was closer to 600,000.
Beyond being a quick economic trap, the pandemic may have accelerated the changes already happening for ticket brokers, experts said.
“The way I think about the future of the secondary market is what it was originally intended for: insane high volume events where demand far exceeds supply and the people who own those tickets have the opportunity to sell them and earn money. ” said Jesse Lawrence, founder of TicketIQ.
The Masters will certainly be one of those events once spectators are cleared in. Indeed, the market around the decorated and curated celebration of golf, southern hospitality and social status has appeared largely immune to industry changes, primarily due to the way Augusta National sells Tickets. Masters.
Rather than just putting the tickets on sale at the box office year after year, club officials are actually running a lottery for entry to the tournament. The series badges, which allow someone to purchase tickets each year, are “fully subscribed,” according to Augusta National. The waiting list for these badges has been closed since 2000, when it briefly reopened for the first time since 1978.
The system made ticket scarcity a tradition of the Masters as much as chili cheese sandwiches ($ 1.50 each in last year’s tournament) – and turned the tournament into a beacon for scalpers, who Often purchased tickets from rule-defying badge holders and buyers. .
Since Augusta National announced the customer ban this year, Stephens, who primarily works with companies that buy tickets for valuable employees or customers ahead of the tournament, has spent much of his time paying off sales. which she said were collectively worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The properties near the club she rented for the tournament are empty.
“It’s like a tight ball of yarn that we unroll,” she says. “I’m a person of faith, and I don’t know why, but I handled it really well.
Other brokers certainly have less cash and have declined. Some have declared bankruptcy and experts believe others will follow suit.
Although DiZoglio described the Masters scalpers as “the strongest of the bunch,” the resale industry has long been filled with stress that at times reached tragic extremes. In 1997, the year Tiger Woods won the Masters, a broker who couldn’t fulfill an order of about 100 badges committed suicide.
More often brokers look at the weather forecast and hope that washes won’t make tickets useless or dumped at bargain prices. “A week of rain could destroy a lot of brokers,” said DiZoglio, who added he had enough savings to get by without Masters this year.
DiZoglio also said he has lost a family member to the virus and is not blaming Augusta National for a decision rooted in public health recommendations. “You can only be so selfish,” he says. “I can use a year off anyway. Things seem to be working well. “
Although Augusta National has made sanctioned ticket purchases from this year to next April, the nature of the pandemic means there is no certainty the club will be able to accommodate spectators in the spring. Club president Fred S. Ridley made no commitments this week.
“We would need hard data which would give us a high level of confidence that we could bring a large number of people to the field by April,” he said on Wednesday, adding that it “would certainly be a circumstance. wonderful if we could test a lot of people. ”
Some brokers were skeptical that potential breakthroughs like a vaccine or improved and scaled-up testing would instantly prompt the club to reopen, especially if the coming months prove particularly tragic.
“Is Augusta really going to be able to be successful with the fans in April, as we come out of a winter where it looks like we’re going to have a ton of cases?” Stephens asked before the tournament started. “I don’t think the storm is over.”
[ad_2]
Source link