US Business Wins London 2012 Ticket Brief
Tickets for the London 2012 Olympic Games will be printed in Arkansas, United States, after an American firm was awarded the printing contract – the 11m tickets, weighing approximately 16 tonnes, will then be transported 4,500 miles to Britain.
A multi-million-pound contract to print the tickets has controversially been awarded to Weldon, Williams & Lick of Fort William.
Previous Olympic organising committees in Seoul and Barcelona gave their ticket printing deals to the national equivalent of the Royal Mint.
A spokesman for London 2012 organisers LOCOG, said: ‘The contract to print tickets was awarded following a thorough, competitive and open tender run through Compete For (tendering website).’
‘As with all of our contracts, a number of criteria are considered including the experience of working on projects of this scale, security, ability to handle large amounts of data and value for money.’
‘Across the project, the Games has been good news for UK plc with 95 per cent of contracts going to British business.’
Meanwhile, it has also been revealed that football is the only London 2012 event which has not sold out, with approximately 1.5m tickets still available.
Although football is still the biggest-selling sport at the Games, only 800,000 of the 2.3m tickets have been sold.
