2019 World Hockey Championship tickets go on sale next week

The IIHF World Championship in Bratislava and Košice will take place between May 10 - 26, 2019.

The Ondrej Nepela ice-hockey stadium during 2011 ice hockey world championship.The Ondrej Nepela ice-hockey stadium during 2011 ice hockey world championship. (Source: TASR)

In a few days, tickets for the 2019 World Championship of the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) in Slovakia will go on sale. The prices for individual matches are quite acceptable (between €20 and €75), the Sme daily wrote but added that those fans who want to watch the Slovak national team live will have to buy some from the packages on offer. These will be sold in the first phase of the process, starting September 19 at 9:19.

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Two phases

“Tickets will be available for purchase in person, in the outlets of the Ticketportal network, or via the internet at hockeyslovakia.sk," head of the championship marketing, Vladimír Janček, said for the daily.

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In the first phase, ticket packages to first round matches and play-offs will be sold, as well as daily tickets for matches in the first round, and a limited number of Follow Your Team tickets – the popular packages for all matches of a single team.

The second phase of selling tickets will start in December 2018. Daily tickets for the play off will be offered within this phase. In the last phase, starting in February 2019, tickets for individual matches will be sold.

“We recommend fans do not wait for February when individual tickets will be on offer but rather to buy them sooner,” head of the Slovak Ice-Hockey Association, (SZĽH) Martin Kohút, said. “We try to organise the championship sensitively: the IIHF world championship 2019 will probably not be the most visited one due to infrastructure but we want to make it emotionally strong, and thus, we have approached the pricing of tickets with this in mind.”

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He added there has already been experience with the championship in 2011 but since then, the system has changed. “Thus, we have rather been inspired by the Czech model from 2015,” Kohút explained, adding that “the primary criterion was to make prices accessible to wide masses of fans” and not to exceed the price level which the Czech Republic set with its 2015 championship. “We can only believe people will find their way to the ice rinks,” the SZĽH head summed up for Sme.

Maximum four tickets of one type

The tickets for one match in the first round will cost between €10 and €75, and the daily ticket in this round will be available for €45 to €175. However, on the days when the Slovak team plays, they will cost at least €95.

At both ice stadiums, in Bratislava and in Košice, three-quarters of the total capacity will be offered to visitors, with the rest being booked for the IIHF representatives, marketing partner, individual teams, and media. “We negotiate to increase the number of seats available for the public so the current figures, three quarters of the total capacity, i.e. of 8,165 seats in Košice and of 9,774 seats in Bratislava, need not be final, Janček noted.

Each fan will be allowed to buy a maximum of four tickets of one type. The popular Follow Your Team tickets will be available for all national teams, with prices oscillating between €230 and €475. Tickets for the whole championship will cost €1,590-plus in the capital, and €1,015 in the eastern-Slovak metropolis.

Limited number of tickets

There will only be 100 Follow Your Team tickets available in the first round, which makes it the smallest group of all ticket categories.

“The figures for individual categories of tickets are derived from previous IIHF championships,” the championship marketing manager, Lukáš Donoval, told Sme.

Theoretically, however, fans on a single team may buy all the Follow Your Team tickets in the first round, e.g. Czechs in the Bratislava group. “But we have experience from previous championships that this number is split proportionally,” Donoval adds.

The ticket prices were lower in 2011. “We want to achieve a larger profit than previous championships, and the money should go towards developing the young ice-hockey talents,” SZĽH president Martin Kohút summed up.

The IIHF World Championship in Bratislava and Košice will take place between May 10 - 26, 2019.

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