Far Hills travel broker dominates the Olympic ticket game
By Star-Ledger Wire Services
November 28, 2009, 2:00PM
AP
Controversy has surrounded Jet Set Sports owner Sead Dizdarevic since the Salt Lake Olympic bid. Dizdarevic has used his powerful personal connections with the Olympic elite to gain a lock on Olympic ticket and travel-package sales in North America and other places around the globe.
It’s a safe bet that few Americans headed north for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics have ever heard of a secretive New Jersey multimillionaire named Sead Dizdarevic.
But he’s very well-acquainted with their money.
You can’t buy an official ticket to the Games without ringing the cash register for Dizdarevic, a longtime Olympic insider who has spent tens of millions of dollars to become the official “hospitality provider” for February’s Games. His exclusive contracts give him a monopoly to sell tickets and hotel packages at steep markups in the United States.
In effect, Dizdarevic is the official ticket scalper for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
Working behind the scenes for 25 years, Sead (pronounced “Sid”) Dizdarevic has used his powerful personal connections with the Olympic elite to gain a lock on Olympic ticket and travel-package sales in North America, Europe, Australia and other places around the globe.
He stands to make more money off the Winter Games than any single person.
Even friends acknowledge his cunning side.
“He has connections that a normal human being could only dream about,” said Djenita Pasic, a longtime friend who used to work for him. “Sead works like a maniac. As a businessman, he’s very tough.”
Dizdarevic and his companies, Far Hills-based Jet Set Sports and CoSport, have perfected the art of white-glove travel treatment for corporate elite and other “Olympic Family” members whose hefty contributions make the Games possible.
Dizdarevic’s companies handle all the official sales of tickets and travel packages to the U.S. public, and all the package services in Canada.
“We win business; we don’t get business,” said Dizdarevic, who rarely grants interviews. “No one gives us anything for free.”
But critics say all that exclusivity comes with a cost — one being borne solely by Olympic fans, the Games’ consumers. Putting so many tickets in one man’s hands, without competition, creates higher prices.
“It not only has a direct impact on the price of tickets, it has a direct impact on availability,” said Houston attorney Jim Moriarty. Dizdarevic’s pricey travel packages, he said, turn the Olympics into “a playground for the rich and powerful.”
Dizdarevic, 59, is as legendary inside the Olympic world as he is unknown outside it.
A decade ago, he was a key figure in the Salt Lake Olympic bid scandal, which jolted the international Olympic movement to its core. He admitted to doling out bundles of cash to curry favor with potential power brokers, Salt Lake officials seeking an Olympics for Utah.
He not only survived that brush with the law, but he emerged as an above-board, official Games sponsor — a role he has only cemented in the years since.
After a middle-class upbringing in the former Yugoslavia, Dizdarevic turned a tiny travel business into a global empire by catering to powerful figures in the Olympic movement and incessantly cultivating new ones who could become future customers.
And it clearly has paid off. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Dizdarevic’s companies earned what appeared to be a record haul. Portfolio Magazine, which interviewed him last year, reported figures that showed he made about $70 million.
Dizdarevic said recently, however, that his profits were more in the range of $20 million to $30 million.
He expects his companies to cater to about 63,000 clients in Vancouver — almost as many as the 74,000 customers they served in the much-larger Beijing Games two summers ago.
Dizdarevic and his companies have seven other offices around the world besides Far Hills. Business has more than tripled since the Athens Olympics of 2004, Jet Set President Mark Lewis said.
The key to that success is simple: Dizdarevic knows tickets are the currency of Olympic travel. Olympic organizations sell tickets to the public for as much as $1,100 a seat at premier events. For those that he controls, Dizdarevic adds at least a 20 percent markup on top of face-value prices.
But the same tickets can generate a much higher profit margin when combined with hotels, transportation and meals to form expensive packages.
His companies amassed 125,000 tickets for Vancouver and Whistler — about 8 percent of the 1.6 million total.
“We are the largest buyer of tickets to the Olympics,” Lewis said, adding that the companies also control as many as 2,000 hotel rooms.
Dizdarevic’s dual roles as a ticket broker and travel-package provider give him convenient options: He can transfer tickets from one market to the other — in some cases, his critics say, artificially creating supply and demand according to his own whim.
“In effect, CoSport and Jet Set have a monopoly on legally valid tickets,” says Moriarty, the Houston lawyer, who researched Olympic ticketing after getting scammed by another agency for Beijing tickets.
In response, Dizdarevic said he’s only doing Olympic business the way it has always been done. The system that gives him total control of Olympic travel for the U.S., he argues, was designed by Olympic leaders, not him. He sees himself simply as one of many “exclusive” service providers for the Olympics.
“It’s not a monopoly,” he insisted. “There’s no such thing.”
– Seattle Times

Share on Facebook