HUNTSVILLE, Al. - That's right, Aubie16: This ticket market has defied traditional logic.
Then again, where's the logic when tickets to a college football game were about $700 apiece on Monday and around $800 later in the week?
Prices of travel packages have been climbing, too. From Thursday to Friday, the cost at Adventure Travel of Huntsville rose from $2,895 to $3,195 when the last of the upper-level seats were sold.
There's certainly nothing traditional about it: Longtime observers of Auburn football say nothing compares to the demand for tickets to the BCS National Championship Game between Auburn and Oregon.
"We could have probably sold 80,000-100,000" tickets, said Scott Carr, Auburn's senior associate athletic director for external affairs.
As it is, Auburn's ticket allotment is 17,000 in the 73,000-seat University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. Band and staff members are included in that total, so "that 17,000 gets smaller real quick," in Carr's words.
For people like Aubie16 - a poster on autigers.com who apparently doesn't qualify under Auburn Athletic Department ticket priorities - that means paying high prices for championship game tickets.
"...This ticket market has defied traditional logic," Aubie16 wrote last week. "We went ahead and pulled the trigger last night. We may have overpaid but there seem to be A LOT of people who have flights and hotels but not tickets yet."
Flights, hotels and tickets are where Susan McDougal, manager of vacation operations for Adventure Travel, gets involved. She's a 1985 Auburn graduate and a 25-year veteran of the travel agency business in Huntsville.
"I've had better response from this one than last year - hands down," she said. "In 25 years, I've never had this kind of response from Auburn fans."
Last year, Alabama defeated Texas in the BCS National Championship Game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif.
McDougal said it took about a week for local Alabama fans to begin booking travel packages. This year, she said, Auburn fans were buying packages as their team was completing a 56-17 victory over South Carolina in the Southeastern Conference championship game.
"It was immediate," she said. "We put it out there on our Facebook page. They were committing. I was on my home phone Saturday taking orders."
Gradually, the price of travel packages began to rise - from $2,695 on Saturday to $2,895 on Thursday, then to $3,195 - the equivalent of a seven-day luxury cruise, McDougal said.
For that, Auburn fans receive a ticket to the game, a charter flight from Birmingham, three nights at the Marriott-Desert Ridge in Scottsdale, a pregame party and ground transportation in Arizona.
"The only thing you have to worry about is food, drinks and souvenirs," McDougal said.
Hotel but no ticket
Such is not the case for some of Aubie16's brethren on autigers.com, a popular Auburn website.
In response to Aubie16, one poster, newness1, wrote, "Everybody I know has a flight and hotel, but 0 tickets (Except for those with enough donations to be able to buy from AU)."
Anne Jewell, president of Cox Associates, and her family qualified to buy from Auburn.
That's because her family is a longtime contributor to Auburn athletics.
"I'm getting calls and e-mails every hour," she said. "The main thing I'm getting is, 'What's your trick for tickets?' The trick is having Tigers Unlimited Tickets for 30 to 40 years."
Tigers Unlimited is the fundraising arm of the Auburn Athletic Department.
Suite holders, Beckwith Club and scholarship donors receive ticket priority, along with Tigers Unlimited members who have made a cumulative football donation of at least $10,000.
Faculty, staff and students are also scheduled to receive tickets. A lottery was held for the students' allotment of 1,500 tickets.
Flight demand high
"Those were the groups that qualified," Carr said. "We wish we had 60,000 or 70,000 tickets."
Demand for airline tickets is also high. During the week, Delta added 4,500 seats to major-bowl sites, including 1,300 seats from Birmingham to Phoenix.
Delta spokesman Anthony Black figures part of that demand is because Auburn hasn't had a national championship season in "50-some-odd years" - 53 years, to be precise.
"We'll continue to monitor" the demand, he said. "If we see an increase, we can add additional flights or put a larger aircraft in place."
If Adventure Travel is any indication, the demand will only rise. Already, the agency has received calls from as far away as Pensacola and Headland, near Dothan.
"Since 1957, there hasn't been a championship," said Sharon McCarthy, one of the agents. "It's a once-in-a-lifetime deal. And they are laying down the cash."