Jet Set Sports Relies on Hospitality Without Olympic Ticket Sales

Alan Dizdarevic, the co-CEO of Jet Set Sports, has been to 18 straight Olympics. But this year’s Summer Games in Paris have been a different experience.

For decades, Jet Set Sports was the exclusive middleman between the Olympics and Americans looking to attend the Games in person, either via standard tickets or pricey hospitality packages. Its hegemony, however, ended abruptly in June 2021, when the IOC fully overhauled how Olympics tickets are sold. The move presented an existential question for Jet Set. The bedrock of its business—direct access to the Olympic events—had disappeared, but the highest margin part of its offerings—the hotels, concierge services, city transportation, food and beverage—was still fair game.

At the time, the majority of the company’s hotel rooms for the Paris Games were already booked, as were a number of clients. The company staked its future on the idea that its existing customer base and experience in hospitality could allow it to keep selling Olympics hospitality packages—just minus the tickets.

“We never lost confidence in the Olympics, or our role in them,” Dizdarevic said in a video interview last week from Paris. “We’ve been involved for 22 consecutive Games, so no decision can eradicate all of that history and experience. We just had to modify how we did business.”

The IOC has historically restricted ticket markups in hospitality packages to a maximum 20% service fee, Dizdarevic said, a number that dropped for the priciest events. He declined to comment on how much the ticket switch has impacted the company’s bottom line. He also declined to provide specifics about the company’s presence in Paris, outside of saying it had about 600 hotel rooms booked and would have “in the thousands” of clients on the ground across the nearly three weeks of the Olympics.

Losing access to the tickets certainly changes the nature of its offerings. Clients who buy Jet Set packages now must acquire their tickets elsewhere (Jet Set can help, Dizdarevic said, but can’t buy for them). Endeavor’s On Location, which was chosen to be the IOC’s global hospitality partner, has repeatedly told Wall Street analysts that it expects profit from the 2024, 2026 and 2028 Games to be in the hundreds of millions.

Prior to the IOC’s shift, Jet Set’s placement in the Olympics ticket ecosystem was extensive. The company, which also goes by its trade name CoSport, was an official sponsor of Team USA and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee’s (USOPC’s) “authorized ticket reseller.” Americans looking to attend the Games essentially had to go through Jet Set.

The company, which was founded in 1984, had similar contracts with a handful of other national teams—in Tokyo, it was the authorized ticket reseller for Jordan, Bulgaria, Croatia, Australia, Greece, Norway and Sweden. To further complicate matters, the USOPC also purchased its own tickets and hospitality with the firm. The payments from Jet Set aren’t detailed in the organization’s tax filings, but the payments to Jet Set are. In the three years from 2018 to 2020, Jet Set received roughly $16.4 million from the USOPC, one of the highest figures for any independent contractor.

The IOC, however, wanted more uniformity in the ticket process. So, in 2021 it finished an RFP process for a global hospitality partner, a platform where fans in Japan, Jacksonville, Jakarta or Jamaica would see the same suite of options. It also consolidated ticketing more broadly under its umbrella. Jet Set participated in the RFP, Dizdarevic said, but the contract ultimately went to Endeavor-owned On Location. The new setup made its debut for Paris.  

Dizdarevic said his company helped create modern Olympic hospitality over the last few decades, and that the IOC’s decision to consolidate “might have been a little bit too far to the other end of the spectrum.” He added that there was a misunderstanding about industry profits among local host committees, known in the industry as Organizing Committees for the Olympic Games (OCOGs).

“I think there was a bit of a misconception among some of these future OCOGs with companies like ours that there was a lot of money that the organizing committee wasn’t getting as a result of the hospitality,” he said. “They perhaps didn’t have the full breadth of knowledge around what it takes to deliver a Games and the investment it takes to deliver given the changing environments of every city.”

Prior to the IOC’s ticket rethink, almost all of Jet Set’s business was Olympics. Now, Dizdarevic said, the group is branching out into other sports, such as tennis, equestrian and esports. Its website lists ticket/hospitality packages for the upcoming Davis Cup Finals in Spain and the Madrid Horse Week.

The full financial truth about Jet Set’s new reality will likely come in future years, not this summer in Paris. Dizdarevic said that his business was still dealing with some make-goods from the Tokyo Olympics, which were postponed a year due to COVID and then held with minimal fans. (Jet Set won a lawsuit from buyers seeking full refunds). And some of its Paris business was already booked by the time the IOC’s changes took effect. That won’t be true for the Winter Games in Italy in 2026, or the Summer Games in Los Angeles two years after that.

“We definitely had to pivot a little bit, but we’re open for business around Milano and LA,” he said. “We’re ready to continue welcoming guests, as we have since 1984.”