Olympic corporate deals 'unsold'

6 October 2011 Last updated at 08:37 GMT By Michael Hirst BBC 2012 Almost two thirds of corporate on-site packages for London 2012 have yet to be sold to companies

With 300 days to go before London 2012, just a third of on-site hospitality tickets for the Games have been sold.

But despite the financial downturn, the company with sole corporate hospitality rights inside Olympic venues remains bullish about sales.

Prestige Ticketing won a tender by Olympic organisers Locog for some 90,000 tickets - about one per cent of the total allocation.

The British public has bought most of the 6.6m tickets available by ballot.

In contrast, more than 60% of the company's deals are still on offer.

The company would not disclose how much it paid for the tickets, nor its expected profit, citing commercially sensitive information.

And, as London 2012 will be the first Olympics to have on-site corporate hospitality, it is not possible to compare figures with previous Games.

Sir Steve Redgrave said Olympics VIP hospitality had lagged behind other sporting events

But industry insiders have told the BBC they would expect a much higher proportion of packages to have been sold after nearly seven months of sales.

In the much-criticised public ballot for tickets earlier this year, top-tier tickets at the Olympic ceremonies cost ￡2,012, with the best seats at athletics events going for ￡750.

The cheapest of Prestige Ticketing's deals cost ￡495, while the most expensive ￡4,500 packages are being sold in batches of 10 and secure seats at the ceremonies or prized athletics and cycling finals.

Sell-out events

Corporate guests enjoying on-site hospitality can expect:

"Best seats in the house" for Olympic events Champagne and canapé receptionFour-course lunch with unlimited "best of British" food and wines Travelcards for London's transport network, although hundreds of parking spaces will also be available

At the Olympic Park, Prestige Ticketing is building a ￡7.5m three-storey pavilion catering for 3,000 guests at a time, just 70m (77 yards) from the main stadium.

Continue reading the main story 70m (77 yards) from the Olympic Stadium Cost ￡7.5m Three-storey pavilion with massive glass atrium Six restaurants catering for 3,000 dinersIn use for just 29 days before being demolishedHospitality venues will also be located at Greenwich Park, North Greenwich Arena, Horse Guards Parade, Eton Dorney and Wimbledon.

The economic downturn meant traditional customers in finance and advertising had been joined by companies in sectors like construction, energy and resources, said the company.

While corporate packages at the women's hockey final had been the first to sell out, there had also been strong demand for the tennis at Wimbledon, rowing at Eton Dorney and equestrian events in Greenwich, said the company.

Prestige Ticketing's Marketing Director Tony Barnard said he was confident other packages would be sold as companies settled their budgets for the next year.

"We're seeing a significant increase in sales activity," he told the BBC. "The ballots for tickets have ended so people know that if they want to go, there's only one way left to go."

Olympic opportunity

Prof Simon Chadwick, Director of the Centre for the International Business of Sport at Coventry University, said that while the financial crisis had hit the corporate hospitality industry in recent years, the exceptional nature of London 2012 would allow it to "transcend prevailing economic conditions".

In a study commissioned by Prestige Ticketing, Prof Chadwick predicted that companies buying hospitality packages - at an estimated cost of ￡1.45bn - would make a return of more than 12% on their investment.

But he cautioned this figure was based on intangible factors such as extra business being generated through goodwill and strengthened business relationships.

Five-time Olympic gold medal winner Sir Steve Redgrave said London 2012 had a unique opportunity to put Olympics hospitality on a par with that at other international events.

"I've been invited to go as a guest with other sponsors of [previous] Olympic Games after I retired, and you're looked after well, but not quite as well as at some of the other major sporting events," he said.

Prestige is one of three official providers for hospitality packages, but has exclusive rights to Olympics venue hospitality.

Thomas Cook reportedly paid Locog more than ￡20m for 200,000 tickets to sell as part of exclusive travel and accommodation packages, while Jet Set Sports are said to have bought 100,000 tickets that are being offered as part of five star deals for overseas customers.

Locog says proceeds from hospitality ticket sales will be used to give free tickets through the Tickets For Troops scheme and the Get Set initiative for school and college students.

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Making Olympic technology work

28 September 2011 Last updated at 23:07 GMT Weighty task: Making the technology for the London Olympics work is a "huge responsibility" says chief integrator Michele Hyron Each week we ask high-profile technology decision-makers three questions.

Michele Hyron: Viewers will be able to choose which competition, nation or athlete they want to follow

This week it is Michele Hyron of Atos,?chief integrator for the Olympic Games in London. She is responsible for leading the consortium of IT partners to design, build and operate the massive IT infrastructure that will support the London 2012 Games.

Ms Hyron leads a team that include employees from Atos and technology partners LOCOG, as well as volunteers.

She already has nearly 10 years of Olympic Games experience, serving as operations manager at the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games, integration manager at Athens 2004 and quality manager at the winter Games in Salt Lake City 2002.

What's your biggest technology problem right now?

As the chief integrator for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, I suppose that people would expect me to have a long list of problems. After all, if the IT doesn't work, then effectively the Games can't take place.

It is a huge responsibility, and one that everyone takes extremely seriously, but this is now my third Olympic Games and Atos's sixth.

While the technologies advance every time and we are faced with fresh problems as we integrate new applications, we have developed a robust process that ensures that we test everything in the lab over and over again.

By the time we get to the Games themselves, we have covered an extensive testing program.

In fact, our work is analogous to training pilots in aircraft simulators.

We throw every possible scenario at the IT teams - from the failure of the communications network to someone accidentally pulling out a plug - and ensure that we can recover from these without anyone at the Games or watching on TV noticing that a problem has even occurred.

The most challenging aspect of the job, though, is undoubtedly the massive increases in the amount of data which has to be organised and channelled with split-second timing.

It is estimated that between the dawn of civilisation - some four to five thousand years ago - and 2003, mankind had created about five exabyte's of data, which is 5bn gigabytes.

Across the world, we now create that amount of data every two days and the volume of business data is doubling every 18 months.

The Olympic Games is no exception. For Beijing, we produced 50% more data than we handled at the Athens Games.

The London 2012 Games will see us process significantly more information than we had at Beijing, as we meet the demands of sports fans worldwide for the latest information on their favourite events and sports stars, and deliver this information via broadcasters, internet and mobile.

What's the next big tech thing in your industry?

Atos is a global business with a presence in more than 42 countries and a workforce of 78,500 business technologists. In many respects our industry covers virtually every aspect of IT and every industry sector.

However, from my personal perspective it is the magic that we can now work with metadata to create a completely different TV experience for watching sport which is the most exciting.

We will have the ability to offer viewers the chance to choose exactly which competition, nation or athlete they want to follow, and enable them to follow more than one sporting event simultaneously.

This digital quality service will be offered over fixed and mobile devices, and is designed to allow sports fan to watch events that aren't even being broadcast on a regular programme.

So unlike the type of technologies people are used to today, with a personal video recorder (PVR) integrated into a set-top box allowing them to select when they view broadcasts, this new approach makes the viewer the director, selecting what they watch, when and from what angle.

Our approach incorporates face-recognition technologies, and this means that a viewer can either have automatic selection of the best shot or a recommendation that they can accept or reject.

The amount of data that has to been managed to offer this service is staggering, and by 2014 we estimate that more than 90% of all data traffic in the world will be video content.

It will be the equivalent of 32 million people streaming Avatar in 3D continuously every month.

What's the biggest technology mistake you've ever made - either at work or in your own life?

As a complete beginner in software development, at the start of my career, I enjoyed developing a program in Assembler.

I made it as compact as possible, playing with the stack and using other tricks. It was great fun!

What I didn't appreciate at the time was that this piece of code was completely unmaintainable.

My colleagues were still blaming me for this work years after I moved on to other things.

It was a really good lesson so early on in my career, and taught me the importance of looking ahead and appreciating the impact of what I do, not just tomorrow but years into the future.

It also taught me that while playing with software is really fun - and it is - delivering programs that are robust and practical is what counts.

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