'Greedy' hotel prices put off Aussie RWC visitors

Australians are coming to support their team at the Rugby World Cup, but they're not planning to stick around, according to an Australian ticketing agent. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Australians are choosing to commute for Rugby World Cup weekends in New Zealand because of "greedy" hotel prices, says an Australian ticketing agent.

Total Sports Travel, one of two official Australian travel agents, had sold around 2000 ticket and accommodation packages to World Cup events - a number lower than expected by this stage, general manager Mike Jones.

The tournament begins in just 16 days, and organisers have to sell 200,000 tickets to meet the target revenue of $268.5m.

Jones said many factors were causing the slow Aussie sales over the last 21 months.

"Australians feel it's over-priced in New Zealand, which obviously it is. There have been inflated prices due to an event.''

He said the world-wide credit squeeze had also cut people's discretionary spending money and the recent Queensland flooding and cyclones affected sales.

"People do question that they feel it's over-priced because most Australians have been to New Zealand at some time or another and at normal times they can go for a lot cheaper.

"The hotels haven't been exactly kind in some of their rates. There's been a lot of greed. Not in all cases, but there have been some examples of price-gouging so to speak.''

He said the most popular package was short two- to three-night accommodation and ticket combinations.

"Australians are going more just for a weekend. We've got some people flying over every weekend for a game and coming back to their job here.''

There hadn't been enough marketing and publicity around the tournament, and the mediocre campaign hadn't created the same buzz he'd seen in New Zealand.

Hopefully sales would rise once the tournament started and he was against discounting tickets.

"They should've thought about it earlier. The prices were too inflated, they were too high for the New Zealand market but you know when you're three weeks out you can't go and discount them now.''

PR efforts are heating up across the Tasman as both the Rugby World Cup minister Murray McCully and Rugby New Zealand 2011 chief executive Martin Sneddon are on a three-day blitz in an attempt to boost sales.

Sneddon is fronting television and radio media and attending meetings and speeches in Brisbane and Sydney.

Rugby New Zealand 2011 spokesman Mike Jaspers said the publicity trip was not a last minute decision, but was Mr Sneddon's second this year.

"We recognise it as an important market, a short-haul market, so we always though there'd be plenty of upside in the market for us. It is a key market, strong dollar, short distance to come.

"We've had fantastic pick-up from Australia anyway with our expectations of around 30,000 fans coming.''

The final at Eden Park and the New Zealand v France and South Africa v Samoa games are sold out.

Jaspers said there was no need to discount tickets to lure more fans to the tournament.

"One - we're pretty confident we're going to meet our sales targets and, two - it would be pretty unfair on fans who've already purchased tickets.''

- APNZ