Sporting Event Insurance?
I am planning a very exciting vacation this year over Labor Day weekend with a good friend of mine. We plan on attending 4 sporting events in 4 days on the East Coast. I am very excited for the trip and I think it’s going to be an epic vacation. However, I’ve been keeping an eye on Wimbledon the past week, and if you have seen any of it, you know that 6 of the 7 days have been interrupted by rain. There are certain sporting events that just can’t be played in the rain and tennis and baseball are two of them. Three of the four sporting events that my friend and I plan on attending are baseball and tennis.
Is there a business model that could be formed around trips like this? We have our plane tickets bought and can’t really push back our departure date, so if it rains, we’re not going to be able to enjoy all of the activities. If you took into consideration the historical data concerning rain (or snow) in certain cities on specific dates and made a predictive model based on that information you could then sell insurance to people who could get their ticket refunded through you (as a third party) if they were unable to attend a sporting event due to weather. Say for $10 an event (more/less depending on the chance of rain/snow) people would buy the insurance and get a full refund if they gave you back the unused ticket of the sporting event. I bet IAC would love to buy this business and have it as an additional upsell for Ticketmaster transactions.
Is there a business there? I think so, but I’ve only been thinking about it for the past 10 minutes. If anyone wants to give it a go, let me know, I’d love some options and maybe a board seat. I hope I don’t like this idea too much or I will have to take this post down in the near future.
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Comments
So a little searching has landed some interesting insight about ticket insurance…nothing having to do with weather. I have provided two options for insurance below, but IN NO WAY do I suggest or promote using a credit card since I included an AmEx link. The fact that the specific game is not completly cancelled (it is just going to be played at a later date) means that your ticket has value and can be used…even if not by you…and maybe you could trade up for something along the rail above the M’s bullpen!
http://home3.americanexpress.com/corp/pc/2006/tix_protection.asp
In thinking about this for a moment, my first thought is that this might work for baseball…downfalls are that anyone would be able to dump tickets for any reason if they were willing to put the $10 insurance. In the long run, the number of people who buy insurance would have to be quite large to recoup the returned tickets that go unused. Maybe very few tickets would be returned, which would be the best case scenario for the insuring company. Tennis would be tough because other than Wimbledon, I have not seen many tournaments that have entire days rained out. Sure it is possible, but would people really put down the money…I guess that is where the pricing of the insurance charge comes in.
In the end, it is something that could be tried on a small scale, but I am not sure those results would be on target because of the limited data.
In the end, I am just not sure…but I think we could get into the used college football jersey selling business if we can find schools that sell used jerseys at season’s end. I am really thinking about contacting schools to ask about this…starting with UGA, of course.