The New Zealand Herald ran a story about the All Black tickets markup scam
A friend helped me get my blog post brought to the attention of the New Zealand Herald. They ran this story titled Fans put hard word on NZRU over agent’s ticket charges on the day of the final autumn international against England.
The thing that got me about the article is that when Ms Faisandier from STIL was asked where all the money went she couldn’t say.
Ms Faisandier said she could not say what percentage of the money went to the rugby union.
She told me on email that it was “about 50/50″. Strange she wasn’t prepared to make the same claim to a national newspaper.
The other thing that struck me was that when NZRU were asked they didn’t have a clue either! I wish we could all run our businesses in such a haphazard manner where letting millions of dollars of potential revenue slip through our fingers wasn’t such a big issue.
NZRU commercial manager Paul Dalton said he could not say what percentage of the money gained by STIL came back to the rugby union.
This quote astounded me because the Herald also had this story where they indicate that the NZRU financial situation isn’t that strong at the moment.
The NZRU is on track to post a small profit this year, a much improved situation from the one predicted six months ago.
You’d think that if they were that broke they’d be wondering if they could have had some of the millions of dollars that have been added to All Black tickets in the UK over the last few years.
Oh yeah and we crushed England 32 points to 6 so it was an excellent day to be a Kiwi.
December 1st, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Awesome! Can your friend get you a cutout of the paper version?
Too bad they didn’t give you a hyperlink.
December 20th, 2008 at 9:17 pm
Hi Carl,read your article in the Herald and I totally agree with you. A group of us travelled to World cup 2007 from NZ with Willements Sports Travel and they charged on average 50% more than the face value of the tickets. I took them to the small claims court in NZ and was awarded $5800 & they also paid back my mates. Their T&C said the tickets would be sold at face value and the arrangement fee was in the travel package so I won on simply them breaking their contract.They were very unhappy about losing as they maintained that they paid it to Gullivers Travel who were their co-partners in Europe . Like you I do not believe the money goes to the R.U. as if this was the case then all tickets should be charged at the higher rate by them in the first place otherwise you have a two tier market and no incentive to support the tours if you are going to be screwed. I believe it may be a travel company scam that has been going on for years and I am most anxious that those travelling to NZ 2011 RWC do not get stitched up in the same way. How shall we do it ? regards, Martin.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
[...] wrote a blog entry on it and one fan even commented that he and his mates had sued STIL for breach of terms and [...]