Australian Open - Papering over Open cracks

I remember pricing up a trip to the Aussie Open after the 2009 tournament. I knew it would not be cheap due to the price of airfare from the UK to Australia at the height of summer but I found the cost of the tennis tickets way over the top. I have been to the US Open in 2009 and was able to purchase a "mini plan" that saved me a lot of money based on individual ticket prices.  There is no such offer for the AO, just individual tickets. The prices are very expensive, based on current exchange rate the Men's Final is £150 compared to £55 i paid for the US Open Final in 2009. A ticket for the Men's final at Wimbldeon this year will set you back £110 and the French Open final most expensive ticket is just over £100. There is no comparison.

Every Slam needs to attract "outsiders" to make the tournament international and I think the AO needs to look at other costs that visitors have to incur i.e flight & hotel. Local interest seems to be on the wane judging by the tv audience figures so they need us. Lower prices is the best place to start.

Courtesy: The Age

The Australian Open is a wonderful event, an ensemble of colour, skill, language and multiculturalism. It is Australia's biggest sporting event, achieving that accolade in 2002 via an independent survey by then Coopers and Lybrand, and has reinforced that status since. With much justification, the Open is a source of great pride to Melburnians.

It is receiving a major facelift that has guaranteed its tenure at Melbourne Park will continue until 2033, not that there was the remotest chance of it leaving to, dare we say it, Sydney.
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With two retractable roofs - soon to be three when Margaret Court gets a bonnet on her arena - and generous public areas, our site in its city locale will not lack for much.

Yet whatever construction is done, it will not be perfect - whether it's parking or shade structures, corporate lounges or media interview areas, just ask anyone who's ever done a renovation, there will always be compromise. Of course, perfection is quite an unrealistic frame of reference.

The real challenges, however, are not the physical overlay but the strategic. Unfortunately, a few cracks are starting to appear and have even caught key stakeholders by surprise.

These include some sloppy scheduling, rampant corporatisation and succumbing to domestic pressures ahead of global interests. The result is too many empty seats at the business end of the tournament and falling TV ratings nationally and internationally.

Unfortunately, these are problems caused by difficult-to-justify hikes in ticket prices and short-sighted scheduling. Fortunately, both fixable, but only with the right mindset.

A tournament director has many responsibilities, but the one with the most ramifications is the production of the daily schedule or, more accurately, the nightly schedule.

With that responsibility comes pressures from a variety of sources - player managers, the players themselves and, above all, TV interests. The latter comes with considerable force, given the money committed.

In my experience, tournament directors need to be strategic. They should stick to the basic rules: be rarely taken by surprise, pre-empt the TV demands and, this is the biggie, never ask a player what their preference is if they know they are not going to like the answer.

These are the golden rules and you tamper with them at your peril.

Based on the evidence of the past few years, there's certainly been a few scheduling howlers, all involving Australians - the fiasco of the Hewitt-Baghdatis 4.30am finish, the Bernard Tomic late-night shows the past two years in a row (OK, he's 18 now and he can handle it), and the Samantha Stosur blockbuster with Serena Williams last year when only half of the first set reached television viewers before the broadcaster pulled the plug.

No doubt these contributed to the dramatic fall in TV ratings from the previous year (as much as 30 per cent in prime time in week one, according to media analysts). You can be sure that changes will be made this year. For starters, Fox Sports has been reinstated as a secondary broadcaster and the Federal Minister for Communications Stephen Conroy has freed up 7Two, but allowing the banishment of Fox last year has to be one of the Open's poorest decisions.

Ideally we will hear from some new talent in the commentary box.

There's another factor that impacts on the event's image - the price of attendance. On my reckoning, the Australian Open is now the most expensive grand slam tournament to attend. It is more expensive than in London, Paris or New York. Organisers will point to the other amazing fact that our Open now has the most prizemoney of the four majors. That's impressive, it has to be said.But that's no consolation for the fans.

It isn't just about the exchange rate - there's been a proactive stance taken in the past few years to corporatise the Open and drive up revenues, especially through increases in public ticket prices for Rod Laver Arena. It began with an average increase across 2008 and 2009 of about 50 per cent, with substantial hikes in corporate seats, too. Increases have continued virtually unabated since, with some uncomfortable consequences.

The Open doesn't sell out any more - not in the women's semis and final, and even a recent men's semi failed to sell out, a reality previously unimaginable.

In 2009, there were 4000 unsold seats to the women's final. Then in 2010, opening its coverage of the women's final, the BBC commented that the tranches of empty seats were embarrassing. Which it was, when you consider the combatants were two greats of the modern era, Serena Williams and Justine Henin, but not altogether surprising when the price of a ticket was $289!

So this year the price has been frozen at $289, while the men's final has risen $50 to $339. The men's semis are $199, and the women's semis $179. Perhaps Tennis Australia can point to market forces and the improved yield (the men's final has sold out), as price has a greater impact on yield than volume. But it is entering dangerous territory on a couple of fronts.

Many will say that, in the end, the marketplace will speak and prices will find the right watermark. But I wonder where it will all lead to? The Australian Open, as Australia's biggest sporting event, belongs to the people.

Our Open is a true entertainment extravaganza, and a real pleasure to attend, especially if you buy a ground pass at $29, which in my view is undoubtedly the best value ticket in sport, and Tennis Australia should be congratulated for keeping the price the same. But buyer beware - we once prided ourselves on the Open being accessible and affordable so, if that's still important, don't the brakes need to go on a little?

And there's a related issue. One of the primary validations of equal prizemoney for men and women is equality of product and pricing.

So why raise perceptions that there is a difference, which the differential in price points between the sexes for the semis and finals inevitably does?

Clearly the prices for the women's semis and finals were overcooked, so the right approach surely would have been to freeze the prices for the men's sessions too. The increase in incremental income for the men's finals is a slight to the women, and surely not worth risking the scrutiny of the WTA or the women players, who would have assumed the prizemoney equality issue was neatly put to bed with no opening for the doubters. May this be only a one-off and parity of pricing returns next year.

Mentioning the women's semis leads me to a further point. They are played in the heat of the day, whereas the final is at night. One of the motivators for splitting the men's semis over two nights, Thursday and Friday, was to play them both at 7.30pm, given that the final is played at 7.30pm too. Clearly that rules out nights as an option for the women's semis, so why the recent move to a night final for the women? Obviously this was driven by domestic TV demands because it's a better time slot for ratings.

The effect, though, was to to take the women's final out of prime time in the US into the middle of the night. Previously, our women's semis and final were the last remaining pointy-end products that were played in prime time in a major European or North American market. That's a valuable asset and one not to be dispensed with lightly.

Further, since 2000, at least one American woman has appeared in eight of the finals and, in 2005, the Serena Williams v Lindsay Davenport final was the highest rating tennis match in ESPN's history. So the move to a women's night final upset ESPN because it decimated the American audience, both those watching the final at home and in sports bars across the US, while enshrining that the semis and finals are played in different conditions. In the interests of global penetration, I think it was a short-sighted decision.

So for me, after five years away from the Australian Open, the report card is a good one. It attracts all of the world's best players and is a true national treasure. Having said that, we need to make sure the emerging cracks don't hurt our cracker Open.

Paul McNamee was tournament director from 1995, and CEO of the Australian Open from 1999 to 2006.