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The Cash-is-Cool Olympics Campaign
The Cash-is-Cool Olympics Campaign
Campaigns » The Cash-is-Cool Olympics Campaign

You can check out any time you like, (but can you meet the fee?)

For athletics fans, it seems as though a thrifty approach to the 2012 Olympic Games has become more important than ever, and will be a far more significant part of the event than any of us had anticipated.

You’ve been through the rigmarole of applying to the online ticket ballot. You’ve waited while the millions of applications are processed. You’ve had your bank account debited at random (or not, depending on the unpredictable system which has left some Olympic fans penniless and many others feeling hard-done-by.) You would therefore be forgiven for thinking that you had reached the final hurdle of the Olympic cash marathon. You would, unfortunately, be wrong.

For so many, the love of the Olympics seems to have been tainted by concerns which boil down to the matter of the cash in your pocket. As we want the 2012 Olympics to be as cash-friendly as possible, we feel that it is all the more important for us to keep you, the consumers, in the know.

Cash is Cool has been keeping an eye on consumer bear traps at the Olympics, and last weekend, an article appeared in The Times that we couldn’t ignore. It revealed visitors to the capital could be asked to fork out up to more than four times the usual for accommodation during the Games, which could prove to be a major problem for the cash-conscious amongst us.

Sure, you might expect to pay more for accommodation during the Olympics. However, you might not expect the reason behind the rise: the actions of LOCOG*, who have triggered the inflation by block buying roughly 90% of rooms in Central London for sponsors and members of the ‘Olympic family’.

Hotels are now looking to maximise their profits on the rooms that are left, meaning that horror stories, such as an unnamed four star hotel which usually charges £200 a room per night, and is asking for £1,100 next August, are becoming the norm. Entire hotels (such as The Cavendish in St James’ Park) have been block-booked.

LOCOG’s promise to provide ‘accommodation options to suit every taste’ now seems totally implausible; accommodation options to suit every pocket, less realistic still.

For the predicted 320,000 foreign visitors, and the hundreds of thousands of members of the British public, who were hoping to make their trip to London for the 2012 Olympics a special occasion, these price hikes are just another cash hurdle. Increasingly, it seems Olympic cash-consciousness is becoming more important than ever.

We would love to hear your opinions on this topic, and any other thoughts you may have about the attempts that are being made to minimise the use of cash at London 2012. Enter our competition here for a chance to win £250.
 

 

* The London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games
 

Thursday, 9th June 2011

Tags:   Olympics  /  London 2012  /  Hotel price inflation  /  LOCOG  /  Consumer  /  Consumer
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