Bosses hope they will avoid ticket sales slump

Goodwood

Bosses believe Goodwood can avoid the squeeze on ticket sales that other racecourses are suffering.

At present they reckon they are on course to attract the week’s usual number of 100,000 and not suffer the dip seen in some quarters.

“Ticket sales have been okay,” Eade said. “The industry is struggling – Royal Ascot saw a dip, they were down about six per cent. But we’re just about holding okay. We’re about flat year on year.

“Lots of racecourses have seen similar. We’re not seeing that as yet and there’s also a trend for sales coming in later.

“Right now, though, we’re in a good place.

“Last year our festival week crowd was about two per cent down on the previous year.

“That was partly down, we think, to people remembering the previous year, when it was really wet, so the hope is this year people will remember the fantastic sunshine we had last year and will come back.”

Meanwhile clerk of the course Ed Arkell is doing a rain dance. “We’re grateful it’s not as warm as it was this time last year. We had a lot of rain in the early part of June so we came into this dry spell in a better position than last year.

“Ideally we’d love 15mm20mm of rain between now and the festival but it looks unlikely we’re going to get that. But the team are doing well; the track’s looking well.”