Bosses won’t reveal how many paid for tickets
COMMONWEALTH Games organisers will not say how many people paid for tickets to Sunday’s closing ceremony.
Despite repeated requests, GOLDOC would only say about “30,000 people entered Carrara Stadium” for the performance.
That figure likely included many of the 6600 athletes and team officials, about 2500 cast and crew members, and workers and contractors needed to operate the stadium.
This would have left well under 25,000 people in the 35,000-capacity stadium.
In comparison, 51,774 people watched West Coast beat the Gold Coast Suns at Perth’s Optus Stadium.
Despite all the public funding that went into the event a GOLDOC spokesman said they were not able to be flexible with ticket prices in the lead up to the event, which were advertised as “selling fast”.
“There was no flexibility in the ticket pricing as that would be unfair to those who had paid the advertised price for equivalent tickets,” he said.
The 15,000 volunteers who gave up their time to make the games a success didn’t get a look in either.
“No Games Shapers were invited to watch the event for free as tickets remained on sale until the ceremony’s commencement.”
GOLDOC would not discuss the break down of ticket sales ranging from $350 to $70 depending on the location of seating, citing commercial confidence.
It comes after organisers paid a Melbourne company more than $125,000 for “ticket price research” back in 2015.