Paying for paying

I wrote this one in July and now I have a better idea of what I was getting for my money I still feel it is worth a public airing.


£82.95!

It is annoying enough that this is the entry fee for a single race. It is more annoying that it is £4 (5.3%) up from last year for the same race. But the final straw for annoying me enough to write about it was that the top £3.95 (another 5%) of the total is a charge for paying by card, when the only option is to pay by card!! Paying for paying pisses me off, and just for the record the Office of Fair Trading don't like it much either. 

But let us look at the price of the whole race. £82.95

For the same money:
I could get groceries for three weeks.
I could fuel my mondeo for over 480 miles. (I could even fuel the supercharged Range Rover for over 350 miles).
I could enter the next 4 most expensive races I have planned for this year.
I could completely replace both pairs of hydraulic brakes on my mountain bike, and get a spare set of discs.
I could use my cineworld pass to go to the cinema every single day for 6 months.
I could buy an ipod nano.
... and so on.

That is just the race entry fee. It doesn't account for the day I have to take off work to travel and register. At least one night, and probably two in a hotel. Fuel. And so on.

So by now you are thinking, fine but what are we comparing to? Surely the organiser are using that money to provide a Rolls Royce service?

So let us look at the numbers from their side.
370 entrants at £79 each (plus add ons for card payments, non-TS members, relay teams etc which I will gloss over for this post). That's an entry income of around £30,000. Plus all the money from sponsors.

So where is all that money going?

On the race? Well that is pretty unlikely. It wasn't closed roads, the boat safety and most marshall were volunteers. The course wasn't heavily marked. The feed stations weren't particularly regular. The electronic timing costs a bit, but barely 4 figures for a single day hire.  A few portaloos and some barriers maybe run a few hundred for the day. There are no serious financial commitments to hosting the race.

On the venue? Unlikely, all open roads or within the council-owned gym hall.

On the goodie bag? Again, unlikely. The hoodie is nice enough (before it shrunk in the wash) but it is maybe £8-10 worth. The swim hat costs pennies if you order them in bulk. The number stickers maybe cost a bit to get them printed but when you order in bulk they were probably pennies per head again. The rest of the goodie bag is all freebies from the sponsors that cost them nothing.

Profits? They are a not-for-profit company that is a registered charity. So it isn't going to shareholders. But it is going in someone's pocket.

So the final decision on whether to pay it comes down to whether I think what I am getting is worth the money. And the first thing that I am not getting is honesty from the organisers. Trying to slip in extra fees at the end after you have completed all the forms is just ridiculous and that £3.95 has held me up from entering for over a month. 


So here we are a month on from the race. I did pay it, but I am still not happy about the cost. The race certainly doesn't justify the price. Even before you factor in hotels and fuel and the like. So I won't be doing it again. And I won't be paying that much for any race again. Back to local events at sensible prices for me.