tickets Archive

Looking to attend this year’s BCS National Championship Game at the Rose Bowl? It’ll cost you. A lot. There are really only three ways to acquire tickets: buy them from the school, buy them from a sports travel agency, or buy them from a scalper. The schools each gets 19,000 tickets and around 53,000 are sold by the Tournament of Roses or given to sponsors. So if you’re not sponsoring the game, we’ve detailed what you’ll have to do to get tickets.

The participating schools, Texas and Alabama, are taking slightly different approaches to doling out tickets. Alabama, with an allotment of 19,000 tickets, took pre-orders that only went to boosters, students, employees and “others associated with the University.” They took 5,000 orders and will no longer accept requests. The tickets were sold at $200 each.

Texas is using economics to solve the problem of supply and demand. The school received 32,000 requests for a little more than 14,000 tickets. The university allotted about 4700 of the 19,000 tickets to students, the band, football team family members, sponsors, and UT officials. The remaining 14,000+ tickets will be sold through the Longhorn Foundation. The tickets are also being sold for $200 — but wait, there’s more. In order to have the right to buy the tickets, you must “donate” $1500 to the Longhorn Foundation. For the 2005 Rose Bowl, Longhorns fans had to donate $650 for the right to buy.

There will be a public sale for tickets starting on December 15th at 11AM eastern. The tickets will cost $275 plus Ticketmaster fees. But you can be sure they’ll be sold out in minutes. Good luck with that.

The remaining options to purchase tickets are both through the secondary market. Currently, tickets can cost anywhere from $899 each for two tickets in the upper end zone to a cool $111,062 for a suite. If you’re looking for less hassle, you can go the sports travel agency route. The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer outlined those options:

Karen Griffin, an agent at Elite Travel in Decatur, Ala., has packages costing $1,599 apiece for double occupancy including end zone tickets, ground transportation and two nights in a hotel. The packages, she said, “are selling like hotcakes.”

She estimates she’s sold 10 packages on her own and demand hasn’t slowed yet. The $1,599 does not include airfare and finding flights in and out of the Los Angeles area is the hard part as of Wednesday afternoon, Griffin said.

There was one offering on the online classified site craigslist.com that solves that issue. For $8,000 per person, Alabama fans can get a seat on a private plane, stay one night in a hotel and sit in lower-level premium seats.

Sportstraveler.com still was offering packages to those sold by Elite that also include round-trip airfare, three nights in a hotel and end zone tickets for $2,905. Take out the tickets and packages cost $2,200.

Ticketmaster had similar offers, but the option to select packages out of Birmingham that were listed Tuesday was not on the Web site as of Wednesday evening. There are still packages marketed toward Texas fans with flights leaving Dallas and three nights in a hotel for $2,295.

Even the official Web site for the BCS Championship and the Tournament of Roses had limited options and a link to its own ticket resale Web site with seats priced no cheaper than $1,000 apiece. Packages similar to those sold by Elite Travel were available on the site tournamentofroses.com, starting at $1,900 for double occupancy.

Still, finding and paying for tickets doesn’t actually mean that you’ll get them. If you’re actually thinking about buying tickets, it’s probably best to avoid craigslist since many of those listings are scams. Here are some tips to makes sure you aren’t victimized by a scammer.

At this point, the best options are probably hoping you can luck out with the public sale or buying a package through a sports travel agency. Though, waiting for the public sale almost guarantees that travel costs will have gone up by then. If you’re bold enough, you could even book your travel and try to buy tickets on-site. That could work out, but remember to review the tickets to ensure that they’re real. It’s much worse to be screwed by fraud than price-gouging.

So if you were trying to come up with a way to drop a few G’s on an evening, the BCS National Championship Game is a good option. Maybe next time around you should just earn yourself a ticket to the game like Colt McCoy and the Longhorns.  Yeah, that was a joke.