Ticket, hotel sales get modest bump from Woods

The vice president of a management group for six Augusta hotels said there was "a big uptick in calls" seeking rooms after Woods' Tuesday announcement that he would make his return to professional golf at the Augusta tournament. However, Marty Matfess noted, those hotels were 85 percent booked already.

Said Matfess, "With or without Tiger Woods, the Masters tournament draws enough people to fill this area and then some."

Officials at the Ritz-Carlton Lodge Reynolds Plantation said the hotel was already nearly full, but interest picked up quite a bit two weeks ago when rumors circulated the Woods would be playing in the Masters. A smattering of rooms were still available Wednesday, including a handful of suites and two lodges, said Gino Marasco, the luxury property’s director of sales and marketing. Standard rooms at the hotel begin at about $699, with suites starting at $859 and cottages going for at least $2,000 daily.

“We did not raise our prices,” Marasco said. “We kept them at the same rates as last year.”

Although Atlanta is several hours away, hotels in the city also are getting in on the act. The W Hotel in Midtown and the Marriott in Buckhead have seen strong interest from fans who want to attend the event.

“We were looking at our week-over-week gains for the weekend of the Masters and we did see a surge of reservations starting two days ago when it was anticipated he would return,” said George McGann, vice president managing director of the Pyramid Hotel Group, owner of the Atlanta Marriott Buckhead Hotel and Conference Center.

Ticket brokers reported some bump in business since Tuesday. On the ticket re-sale Web site stubhub.com, the average purchase price of Masters tickets went up roughly 10 percent on Tuesday. Page views for Masters tickets increased 70 percent and the sales volume for the Web site was five times the daily average, with Masters tickets outselling everything else, including NCAA tournament tickets.

At ticket brokerage razorgator.com, sales increased about 30 percent over the average from mid-afternoon Tuesday to the end of the day, vice president Sam Soni said, but returned to normal Wednesday. Prices remained steady, with the price of a four-day badge hovering between $2,000 and $2,200 and a practice badge ranging between $200 and $375, depending on the day.

Soni said he believed the prices reflected the public's expectation that Woods would play even before he made his announcement.

The announcement "wasn't a market mover, let's put it that way," Soni said.