T&T spends $93m to host Cricket World Cup

Local Organising Committee CEO gives a breakdown

BY SANDRA CHOUTHI

The bills for goods and services for a mega event like Cricket World Cup are astronomical.

Take, for instance, the cost of renting buses to ferry cricket teams, coaches and cricket fans to and from the airport, to practice matches and to the games.

According to Anand Daniel, CEO of the Local Organising Committee (LOC), the Public Transport Services Corporation (PTSC) quoted a price of US$126.50 an hour.

“We paid about $1 million to use PTSC buses. We used for the park-and-ride locations at Mannie Ramjohn, Ato Boldon and Larry Gomes Stadiums an average of five buses each on every match day,” Daniel said.

“The LOC used PTSC buses for about six hours daily. The math worked out to be about $1 million, and I’m still working through the numbers to make sure that it’s not a little bit more,” he said.

There were 58 practice sessions and ten matches. Five park-and-ride buses were used at each stadium for at least six hours daily.

Each team had use of two buses, one of which was on standby in case of a mechanical failure or the like, for roughly 12 hours daily.

The buses were rented for 20 days.

Do the math.

New buses were imported from China and Brazil for CWC. These buses had luggage compartments above the seats and on the side of the vehicles to accommodate the bulky luggage of teams and officials.

The park-and-ride facility did not bring in much in the way of funds. At $20 a head, the loss the LOC sustained was expected.

“If you divide US$126 an hour by 50 passengers, you’d see very quickly that $20 was a loss, but we couldn’t make it more than that because the normal price was about $14 a return trip.”

By Daniel’s reasoning, the money spent on the park-and-ride was worth it because such a system had not been used before for a mega event.

Had the park-and-ride system not been in place, there would have been greater congestion on the roads leading to match venues, Daniel said.

Tickets

The receipts from the sale of CWC tickets were about $9 million.

The projection was for between $10 million and $12 million.

“We kept the price of the tickets quite low. It was a collaborative effort with one price across the region. It ranged from US$10 to US$20 for warm-up matches at UWI, and from US$25 to US$90 when India was playing. When they were not playing, then it was US$15 to US$55, so there was a good range of tickets for a wide variety of people with different kinds of discretionary income,” Daniel said.

Approximately 2,000 Asians and a similar number of returning nationals came to Trinidad for the matches.

According to Daniel, 48,823 tickets were sold for the India/Sri Lanka and Bangladesh/Bermuda matches at the Queen’s Park Oval, which has roughly 100,000 seats.

Another 3,000 tickets were pre-allocated for sponsors.

For the four matches held at the UWI grounds, Daniel said 13,196 of the available 16,942 seats were sold. The remaining seats were either not sold or occupied by teams, officials, media and sponsors.

“We sold a lot of seats. Whether people came or not was another thing. When India got knocked out, people didn’t want to go. In fact, 63.50 per cent (of seats sold) was the average for most matches across the region,” Daniel said.

‘First-class event, first-class rates’

Asked whether officials in the public and private sectors called the LOC asking for freebies, Daniel said, “The policy was that there were no free tickets. The LOC were never allocated free tickets to allocate as complimentary.

“We treated with that in a very simple way: in a world event, there are no free tickets. We had to buy tickets. I bought tickets for myself and my wife and some friends. The chairman purchased tickets for his own use,” Daniel said.

“And we did buy some tickets from the LOC for certain sub-committee members, our directors. We bought 200 tickets a match and those were allocated to staff, directors, sub-committee members. We had a lot of directors and staff who put in a lot of hours.”

Daniel said some people who cancelled tickets were offering them “illegally” for sale on E-Bay and Yahoo, which popped up on his computer, “World Cup tickets for sale” from unauthorised areas.

First-class prices

There was a world-wide bid for the catering services for CWC in the nine host countries.

Tenders were submitted from as far away as Australia and France and the United States.

Goddard Catering Group Ltd of Barbados was selected as the concessionaire.

“They brought international standards to public health and safety to open flame, etc,” Daniel said.

Goddard sub-contracted in T&T to Allied Catering which approached local vendors.

“I had made phone calls through my staff to all the local vendors who would have normally been at the Oval through the T&T Cricket Board. We got that listing and called many of them. Many of them we couldn’t find; they don’t have numbers. We got about 80.

“We had a meeting at the Queen’s Park Oval where Allied Catering came, talked about concession fees, talked about the requirements for public health. Then they chose, depending on the category of food that they wanted. They had people who sold bake and shark and pelau and roti and doubles; local content food,” Daniel said.

Individual vendors were charged a concession fee.

“You have to remember, Pepsi is a major sponsor. Pepsi has an affiliation with KFC. And KFC prices were like ten to 15 per cent over the norm. They got to come in, set up all the fire equipment, they got to burn the flames. All that has to be done and keep it there for the six days at the Oval,” Daniel explained.

“And then you have to do the same thing out of UWI. So there were significantly higher costs associated with a world event. I think people have to understand, with all due respect to those who said that the price of a beer was $18,” he said.

He spoke of bars and restaurants at which patrons regularly pay $22 for a beer.

“I’m just saying when you fly first-class, you pay first-class rates. When you are in a first-class hotel, you pay high rates. When you have an event of international, world standard, the price tends to be higher,” Daniel said.

Tenders

The LOC saw some companies submitting “some higher prices” for various items.

“The PTSC’s rate was surely not the normal range.” Daniel said. “If somebody wanted to hire a bus to take them to Maracas, they won’t be paying that kind of price. We had to accelerate to get work done quickly.”

Regarding construction work at the Queen’s Park Oval, St Mary’s College grounds, which was used as a practice ground, Daniel said: “We found that it might have been, in a normal environment, without the demand, it would not have been as expensive.”

In following the LOC’s strict tendering rules of getting three quotes for products and services, Daniel said he was surprised at the quantum in the range of quotes from government agencies supplied to the LOC.

“We found anywhere from ten to a 30 per cent difference between quotes.

“In some instances, we saw very vastly different prices where one quotation would end up to be $30,000 and the highest would be ten times that.

“In most cases, we went with the best equipped because the lowest is not always the best,” Daniel said.

In total, the local economy benefited from the LOC spending $70 million for goods and services in T&T. Out of that, $19 million was spent on refurbishing the Oval.

“Almost everybody has been paid. Progress payments were made as work was done. We are not holding back payments,” he said. SC

LOC closes up shop

The CWC Local Organising Committee (LOC) will officially close its offices in the Tatil building on Maraval Road on June 30.

“We have our rent paid until that time,” CEO Anand Daniel said.

After it has shut its doors for good, the LOC will leave hard copies and e-files for any one interested in how it managed, structured and ran the Cricket World Cup.

Daniel figures that the LOC left behind a legacy in how it put together a mammoth task, aspects of which might come in handy for this country’s preparation to host the 2009 Caribbean Olympic Games.

As to the International Cricket Council’s requirement of host governments for an LOC administrator to stay on two years after CWC ends to treat with any questions or issues that may arise, Daniel said the administrator will more than likely be a LOC staff member who understands what transpired from the discussion level to the execution stage for CWC.

Asked if he’ll be staying on, Daniel said, “Probably not.

“I’m on contract. My contract ends on May 31, but I will stay on. The chairman asked me to stay on until June 30,” he said.

Daniel said he has received several private sector job offers but declined to go into details except to say that none of them have to do with managing sports.

Media passes

The LOC made about $120,000 from the issuance of an estimated 100 media passes which cost US$200 each.

“Everything is in United States currency because it is an international match,” Daniel said.

LOC’s budget

Anand Daniel, CEO of the Local Organising Committee for Cricket World Cup.

Cabinet approved $90 million for the LOC to arrange CWC.

This was increased by another $3.5 million because of additional cost incurred in having to shift the holding of three warm-up matches from the unfinished Brian Lara Stadium in Tarouba to the UWI grounds.

As of April 5 when this interview was conducted at the LOC’s office at Tatil building, Maraval Road, the LOC had in its coffers an estimated $15 million, out of which outstanding bills were to be settled.

“We’re still paying GL Events, a lot of the security costs, catering, power, TSTT bills.”

Daniel said President Maxwell Richards and Jean Ramjohn-Richards went to Jamaica for the opening match between West Indies and Pakistan, the tab for which came out of the President’s Office.