Ryder Cup 2006

The Ryder Cup will be back again in 2006. The event will take place at the K Club, in Straffan, County Kildare, Ireland. Looks like a beautiful club and a great location for the event. You can check out their web site at www.kclub.ie.

I read this week that PGA Europe will be notifying lottery participants sometime in September of 2005 as to if they were granted tickets or not. On the application for the lottery they requested your passport number which originally led me to think they would be trying the same sort of tom-foolery as FIFA is with the World Cup. However, I went on to read and find out that their mechanism for eliminating the black market in tickets to the event will be requiring all lottery winners to pick their tickets up in Ireland and they will have to show their Passport to get them. I could almost hear a collective sigh from scalpers, brokers, and touts worldwide. Big Deal! We take our orders, show up in Dublin and start buying!

There will be 40,000 people admitted to the event each day, but only 32,500 of those will be made available to the public.

One unusual thing of note about this Ryder Cup is that there appears to be no International Pavilion ticket like we had at Oakland Hills last September. If you look at the ticket order page there are only grounds tickets listed. I guess it is always possible they will make them available for sale at a later date. It would be a shame if they do not have the International Pavilion because that is the ticket I used when I attended the event last year and I found the IP tent to be first class and well worth the extra coin.

Currently there are only a handful of brokers in America that are taking orders for the event but many in the UK. When you check prices you will find that they are all over the board. We are priced significantly higher than we were for the event at Oakland Hills. We think it will be a tougher ticket, we also are factoring in currency exchange risk, the unknown of the policing environment, and our cost of travel. Interest remains steady and we have had buyers trickling in so we see no reason to lower our prices and in fact we just raised them last week. You can check our prices at http://www.alphatickets.com/golf/ryder-cup-golf-tickets.htm.


Until tomorrow - Adios!