take my money, please

The 2007 Women's World Hockey Championships are in Winnipeg this April. Ever since I heard about last summer, I've been excited to go. Especially when we got our act together enough to realize that we'd actually be living here when the tournament was on, so we wouldn't have to work in a visit to Winnipeg in April. (Personally, I feel that Winnipeg is not at its most attractive in March and April -- the weather is too unpredictable, so driving can be a gamble, and you don't know if you're coming to winter or slush-season. Of course, Thunder Bay is the same, but I digress.)

So I've been looking to buy tickets. I'm not particularly interested in seeing a lot of games, but I definitely want to go to the gold-medal final to (knock on wood) cheer Canada on. Beyond that, I thought I might buy walk-up tickets to a game or two if I had a free evening. So I've been checking the Ticketmaster website and going to the arena box office on a regular basis since Christmas, only to be told that I could only by six-game packages and that individual games wouldn't go on sale until sometime in March -- and they wouldn't even tell me when in March.

Now, I understand full well that packages are attractive to the organizers, and I can see why. But let's face it, women's hockey is not that much of a draw, especially games that don't involve Team Canada. I mean, the Kazakhstan women's hockey program really can't be considered very strong, and the gap between the Canadian and American teams and the rest of the world is wide enough that one can make a legitimate case for eliminating women's hockey as an Olympic event on the grounds that it's really not much of a competition (I disagree with this argument, but that's another story). Frankly I'm not really interested in China vs Switzerland or Sweden vs Germany.

But less than a month before the tournament and I can't buy tickets for the one or two games that I want to see? Do the organizers really think that I'm going to say, "Well, I can't buy tickets for only one game yet, so I'll buy them for six"? Who has time to see six hockey games in ten days?

I have a hard time thinking any business model that is refusing to take my money is a good one.