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london olympics tickets tours packages.
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Showing posts with label
london olympics tickets tours packages.
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http://www.london2012-tours.com/
http://www.london-tours-2012.com/
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As Spyns clients gear up for the London 2012 summer games, our London package clients can rest assured there will be plenty of tickets going around. Two million people have signed up for tickets for the London 2012 Olympics, chief executive Paul Deighton said on Christmas Day. Organisers are steeling themselves for the "mind-boggling" task of masterminding the ticket sales, as well as planning and managing seats for the 8.8 million tickets, which are vital to raising £2 billion from the private sector to stage the Games. The London 2012 organisation needs to get 25% of its revenue from ticket sales. London 2012 tour operators like Spyns will purchase tickets through the regular channels and then via re-sales of tickets through British consolidators.
The 6.6 million tickets for the public go on sale in March and, according to Deighton: "The sheer scale of this is mind-blowing. Just the operational stuff is mind-blowing." The real pressure will come when the application system goes live in what London 2012 chairman Lord Coe has described as the "daddy of all ticketing strategies". Mr Deighton said: "One of the key things for us in March is to make sure that things go smoothly. Making sure that everyone understands there is no advantage in submitting applications on the day.
"With two million people (on the database now), and probably nearer 2.5 million by March, it is also about making sure they are transferred into the ticketing system. "It is a year of extraordinary demands in getting ready for the Games and in terms of operational delivery. "Don't forget most of our venues are not yet built. Work is being done on how many games of volleyball are in one session, how many television channels there will be and where are the televisions going to go. And all this is given that we still have to get our licences.
"The showjumping venue in Greenwich and the beach volleyball venue in Horse Guards is just a diagram on a page at the moment and we are figuring out if it is A4 or A3. We have to figure out how many seats there are. e (London 2012) have been around for five years now and this process (ticket sales) is really an important part of a project."
http://www.london2012-tours.com/
www.london-tours-2012.com
The Princess Royal has unveiled the Lee Valley White Water Centre, the first brand new venue for the London 2012 Olympic Games to be completed. The £31m project, which incorporates the 2012 Olympic slalom canoe course, was finished on schedule and will be open to the public from April 2011. Britain's top canoeists have exclusive use of the facilities until that time.
"I've been waiting for this course for such a long time - it's absolutely brilliant," said GB's Richard Hounslow. Until now, World bronze medallist Hounslow and his British team-mates had trained at Nottingham's Holme Pierrepont course. We now have in Britain the best white water stadium in the world. But the entire squad will now move from Nottingham to Hertfordshire and base themselves at Lee Valley ahead of London 2012, offering what could prove a crucial home advantage.
"Our programme has chosen to relocate and, personally, I think that's a brilliant idea," said Hounslow. "To train here day in, day out, will be so good for us. "After April [once the course opens to the public] other international teams can relocate here if they want to, but I can't see it happening, so for us it'll be a really big advantage." The venue, near Waltham Cross, will be operated by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority and will offer the public rafting and canoeing facilities, on both the main 300m Olympic course and a separate 160m intermediate run. Temporary stands will allow up to 12,000 spectators to watch the Olympic events in 2012, with hopes high for a British medal after David Florence won silver at the Beijing Games in 2008.
The £31m course was completed in just under 18 months. "The completion of the White Water Centre - on budget and over 18 months before the Games - is a huge milestone," said John Armitt, chairman of the Olympic Delivery Authority. "As the first brand new 2012 venue we have finished, it is a clear sign of the early legacy the Games are already delivering." Construction at the site began in July 2009 and has involved more than 150 workers. The course uses enough material in its banks, obstacles and venue landscaping to fill the Royal Albert Hall, while canoeists must navigate a drop in height of 5.5m from start to finish.
"The biggest thing about the course is the amount you can change it," Hounslow told BBC Sport. "There's a new system which means you can put obstacles wherever you want - you don't want to build a course out of concrete and then find something doesn't quite work. "Here, we can tweak things until we have the perfect configuration. And it's just fun. It's a little bit cold in this temperature, but it's great fun. In 25 years it will still be a very good course."
British Canoe Union chief executive Paul Owen said: "We now have in Britain the best white water stadium in the world. "We look forward to providing a sensational event for the 2012 Olympic Games in a venue with a lasting legacy." Weymouth - where the sailing events will take place - was the first venue to be completed after London won its Olympic bid, but work largely involved enhancing pre-existing facilities - whereas Lee Valley is an entirely new development.
Olympic organisers expect the velodrome to be the next completed venue, early in 2011, followed by the Olympic Stadium.
Spyns is an active travel company based in Whistler, BC (Canada). For more information about Spyns and our tours to the 2012 London Summer Olympics, please visit our websites http://www.london2012-tours.com/ and http://www.london-tours-2012.com/ or call us toll-free at 1.888.825.4720.
www.london2012-tours.com
www.london-tours-2012.com
As Spyns gears up to launch is London 2012 Summer Games website, Londoners are starting to resent the growing list of demands by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Entire hotels have been reserved for IOC fart catchers, the Union Jack must be smaller than the Olympic Flag and, of particular insult, French will be the official language of the London 2012 games.
In a WikiLeaks world, Britain's document cache is just as long, just as embarrassing to the UK, and just as closely held as the collected thoughts of the U.S. diplomatic corps: it is the complete, contractually binding and previously confidential set of demands made by the 115-member International Olympic Committee (IOC) on poor old London for the 2012 Olympic Games.
Like the WikiLeaks, the Olympics leak is by turns creepy and amusing. And it is just as revealing in its detail. Londoners already knew, for instance, about the politburo nature of the IOC. What Brits did not know is that London is, according to these contracts, required to provide the IOC and the ‘Olympic Family’ (including the Committee members, staff and officials) with 40,000 hotel-room bookings for the entire duration of the Games.
This includes 1,800 four and five-star hotel rooms for the IOC elite. Six Park Lane hotels have been booked out for the duration of the Games, including the Dorchester, the Grosvenor and the Hilton. The 40,000-room booking does not, of course, include accommodation for the competitors themselves — they are having an Olympic Village built for them at a cost to taxpayer of £325 million. Nor is any accommodation being reserved for spectators. On the evidence of the documents, visitors to the Games will probably find that any hotel within a 50-mile radius of London is already fully booked by the third assistant director of the Togolese handball federation and his extensive support staff.
We knew the IOC was being given 250 miles of so-called ‘Zil’ lanes — named after the old Soviet limousines that enjoyed traffic-free passage. They will stretch from London to Weymouth, where the sailing games are being held. It now emerges that there will also be 500 air-conditioned limos whose drivers must wear hats and uniforms. The IOC does love its little details. The hat stipulation is one of literally hundreds of examples of its micro-management. London must provide a ‘dance café’ in the Olympic Village, so that the athletes can boogie together.
A flower shop is also required, which the IOC insists ‘should provide a range of flowers and gifts for customers in the Olympic Village’. British taxpayers will be relieved to know that ‘a balloon rental service is optional’. The guidance given by the Olympocrats can be bewildering — it offers pages of information about the employment of housekeepers for the athletes, for example. ‘It is recommended that the same housekeeping staff perform their duties for the same teams daily’, because this will ‘build relationships and trust’, ‘give confidence’ and ‘maintain standards’. Making the bed is not enough.
These IOC edicts are called the ‘Olympic technical manuals’. They are attached to the contract signed by the then Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, when we won the right to host the Games in July 2005. The contract itself was later made public, but for years London 2012 and City Hall refused to publish the manuals, furiously resisting Freedom of Information requests on the grounds that the ‘confidence of the IOC’ must not be breached. It took two years of campaigning by Paul Charman, a strikingly determined east Londoner, for the documents to come to light. The real reason, perhaps, for this sensitivity is not because of the hats, the dance cafés or any of the other petty embarrassments. It is because the documents show that the British authorities have cravenly agreed to let the IOC create what is, in effect, a state within a state.
During the Games, normal London life, including ordinary commerce and the right to basic freedoms, must be subordinated to the five-ring circus that is the Olympic ‘brand protection’ policy. The IOC is paranoid about what it calls ‘ambush marketing’, which it claims is a ‘serious potential threat to the Olympic Movement’ even if it admits that it has, in fact, ‘not been a significant problem in the past’. Ambush marketing, in the Olympocrats’ eyes, appears to be any branding or promotion for an organisation which has not paid large amounts of money to the Olympics organisers.
Candidate cities, the manuals say, ‘are required to obtain control of all billboard advertising, city transport advertising, airport advertising etc for the duration of the Games and the month preceding it to support the marketing programme’. The cost of hiring these billboards alone will surely be enormous. Customs officers and police must ‘co-operate’ in taking action against unapproved Olympics advertising and the confiscation of non-official goods. So in other words, police officers may be diverted from catching criminals to enforcing the commercial interests of the IOC. Customs officers, instead of searching for heroin and child pornography, may end up targeting fake Olympics T-shirts.
Spectators at the Games ‘must not wear clothes or accessories with commercial messages other than the manufacturers’ brand name’. So, for instance, any ten-year-old boy who is foolish enough to wear his Manchester United replica shirt, emblazoned with the commercial logo of the team’s sponsor Aon, could be forced to remove it or be denied admission to the Games.
No ‘athlete or other participant’ at the Games can wear any clothing on which the manufacturer’s name takes up more than 10 per cent of the surface area, or 12 square centimetres. No journalist covering the Games is allowed any ‘signage of any kind’, even for his or her own publication — on ‘camera bags, hats or other garments’.
The toughest restrictions apply inside and immediately around the Olympics venues (if you’re a newsagent next to, say, Greenwich Park with a Pepsi sign on your shopfront, heaven help you). But there are also quite serious restrictions in so-called ‘Level 4’ areas — that is, the whole of the rest of the city — in which the organisers of the London Games ‘must attempt to exert as much control over advertising as possible’. Brand protection teams’ will, according to the manuals, ‘conduct surveillance . . . in the [host] city’. They must ‘attempt to confiscate any infringing ambush material whether inside or outside the venue’.
So much for the idea that it was just the police that had search-and-seizure powers on the streets of London. Some of the teams will be accompanied by ‘an attorney, in case it becomes necessary to serve any court documents’. And they ‘must have a police officer within the team or on call within range to assist if necessary in the enforcement of the orders’. Here, things become even more grandiose. There is even, according to the documents, an ‘airspace plan’ for London 2012, ‘to prohibit any [non-sponsored] presence within the airspace above Olympic venues, and in the surrounding areas within the host city’. However, even the IOC has the grace to admit that ‘there may be obstacles to carrying out airspace requirements completely. For example, it may be impossible to alter the regular flight pattern of commercial airlines’.
Long-suffering taxpayers have been given the impression that the Games will put our nation on the global map, but the documents suggest that something rather different will happen. In fact, a geographical space off north-west Europe currently occupied by a nation called Britain will, for the duration of the Games, be taken over by an entirely new country. For at every ceremony during London 2012, by contractual requirement, the Olympic flag must be more prominent than the Union flag: ‘Precedence of flags: Olympic Flag, Flag of the Organising Committees for the Olympic Games (OCOG) or city, flag of the province, region or canton, national flag,’ the manuals insist.
Her Majesty will doubtless acquiesce to the IOC’s demands for an Olympic ceremony and royal reception on the day before the Games officially open, although it is worth noting that she has little choice. The documents make clear that, as a matter of course, ‘IOC members are presented to the Head of State’, after which they will all watch ‘an artistic programme reflecting local traditions or culture’. What a national triumph. Naturally, the costs associated with all of this are not borne purely by the British taxpayer: £1.4 billion of sponsorship has been raised to finance the games, and the IOC will contribute tens of millions more.
The trouble is that the burden on the taxpayer has already reached roughly £12 billion. We may be paying the piper, but these documents show that it is the IOC who is calling the tune. In perhaps the most insulting touch of all, London must ‘ensure that billboards and pageantry are displayed throughout the city’. As well as being in English, ‘such billboards and pageantry shall be in French’ — which is the second language of the IOC. London beat Paris to host the 2012 Olympics, and yet we are required to plaster our capital city with thousands of posters in French. England may still be sore about losing the World Cup last week — but by God, look at the Olympic guidelines and you’ll realise that we dodged a bullet. There really are only so many Zil lanes and smartly dressed chauffeurs a country can put up with.
Spyns is an active travel company based in Whistler, BC (Canada). For more information about Spyns and our tours to the 2012 London Summer Olympics, please visit our websites http://www.london2012-tours.com/ and http://www.london-tours-2012.com/ or call us toll-free at 1.888.825.4720.
