Royal Ascot Tote betting suffers shock 10% drop







Main Menu
News









Current




GGG

News

Welcome to the News desk.

Royal Ascot Tote betting suffers shock 10% drop

25/6/2008

Greg Wood

Executives at the Tote expressed their disappointment yesterday as the pool-betting operator released figures showing that turnover at Royal Ascot was down by 10%, despite the meeting recording an increase of 4.7% in overall attendance to 287,876. Nearly £8m was bet with the Tote at Ascot in 2007, but this year, the total was just £7,167,943.

Royal Ascot

The sudden drop in Tote turnover is seen as a sign of tougher economic times compared to 2007, but also as an indication of the kind of competitive pressures that the Tote is likely to face in the years ahead. Royal Ascot is a meeting at which the Tote would normally expect to do well, due to the high number of "casual" racegoers, who are more likely to bet at the nearest window than walk to the betting ring before each race. A number of "satellite" areas for bookmakers, away from the traditional betting ring, were in use at this year's Royal Ascot for the first time, however, and appear to have been a major success with the punters.

"The tough economic conditions certainly had an effect on Totepool turnover," David Craven, Totepool's managing director, said yesterday. "Fewer customers were betting at the windows and with our couriers this year. The introduction of new satellite SP bookmaker positions dotted around the race course also impacted Tote turnover.

"Moving forward, the Tote is developing its own solution to compete with satellite SP positions which will be trialled this summer. We believe this will provide greater net income to racecourses."

The drop in Tote turnover at Royal Ascot seems to chime with the observations of many ring bookmakers last week that business at the Royal meeting, where the strength of the markets was once a match for the Cheltenham Festival, is not what it was. Racegoers at Ascot, it seems, now want the experience without so much of the risk.

Saturday's attendance of 70,675, which was within 2,500 of the figure for the hugely popular Ladies' Day on Thursday, suggests that the final day of the meeting could soon become the most popular of the week, despite having been added to the Royal meeting just six year ago.

However, the first two days of the meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday are struggling to compete, and despite modest rises to 40,092 and 41,911 respectively, both were nearly 20,000 adrift of Friday's figure, never mind the bumper crowds on Thursday and Saturday.

"What we've found is that people are still coming but when they get here they are just easing off a bit," Nick Smith, Ascot's head of communications, said yesterday. "Sales of champagne were slightly down in all the public enclosures, for instance, and we sold about 150,000 bottles across the site when we would normally expect to sell about 170,000.

"Saturday's figure was brilliant. People are coming back to Ascot, but just not in quite the numbers we would want to help boost Tuesday and Wednesday. It may be a sign of the economic times, in that people want to come to Ascot, but they are not prepared to give up time in the office in order to do so."

Tuesday's meeting opened with three consecutive Group One events, but these were played out in front of grandstands that felt empty, by Ascot standards, and with no hint of the sort of atmosphere generated on the final three days of the meeting. However, Smith believes the grand opening to the meeting is still the best way to begin, regardless of the relatively disappointing crowd.

"It starts the whole thing with huge momentum," Smith said. "In a way you could almost argue for more Group Ones earlier in the week, when the real racing crowd is there. The bottom line is that we were up by nearly 13,000 people. We used to get 50,000 on Tuesday but times have changed and we're probably not going to get back to that. At the same time, we are not going to go back to just 40,000 on Saturday either."