RICHARD PAGE – PWA TOUR MANAGER
“The only truly fixed cost at a PWA event is the prize money, which is set by the sailors and non-negotiable. The current rate for Slalom events is 55,000 euro. Beyond that there are certain minimum requirements that must be met, such as the costs for the PWA crew to come to the event, live streaming and media budgets as well as infrastructure requirements, such as accommodation for crew and the top 20 sailors, storage and security for sailors’ equipment, boats and hardware, that kind of thing. Some of those aspects require budgets to be paid to the PWA, some are simply items that must be provided physically.
Where budgets are paid to the PWA, such as for the PWA crew or live streaming service, we calculate those budgets at cost, with no margin for the PWA, as our aim is to keep costs to an absolute minimum and promote new events. As a result, those budgets can vary massively depending on the location of the event (as this impacts flight costs), the number of days the event will run for (which affects total wages for the crew) and the exact crew numbers required. We only ever travel with an absolute minimum of crew to ensure that the event is run to the required standard and try to utilise local crew as much as possible.
As a ballpark figure, for a single discipline event in Europe, running for 5 – 7 days, with a basic live streaming and news setup for media, and basic onsite infrastructure, we estimate that the total ‘cash value’ of everything required at an event will be in the region of 160,000 euro (please note this is a rough guide and individual circumstances can vary even at that level). It is important to distinguish between cash value and actual cost, as much of what is required may be provided through sponsorship (hotel accommodation for example from a hotel sponsor) and not need to actually be paid for with cold, hard cash, but that figure is a reasonable guideline of the value.
At a multi discipline event, running for 10 days or more, with a large-scale beach infrastructure and media setup (like Sylt), those budgets can be significantly more, but that is easy to understand when you see the scale of the event. The actual budget paid to the PWA will be far less than those figures, probably about half in most cases, but the majority of that is prize money, or costs for third party services, which are then paid out again, so very little of that money is coming in to the PWA itself.”
Our aim is to keep costs to an absolute minimum and promote new events.