104. SINGLE OR RETURN?

One of the biggest expenses a pro tennis player has to budget for is flights. By the pure nature of the job, a pro player travels the world on an almost weekly basis and the majority of the journeys taken are by plane. A player can be in the UK one week and Colombia the next. Then she may have to head to the USA or back to Europe, or even Asia. It’s a constant slog; an expensive one costing a player very many thousands of pounds each year.

Air travel is not cheap, especially when you are playing a tournament and consequently have no idea when you will be out of the event, or when you will be leaving one country and travelling to the next. More often than not, a player has to buy a single ticket to her destination, which is a more expensive way of doing things than purchasing a return. But if she doesn’t know when she is leaving a particular country, and where she is going to next, then a return ticket is not really an option.

Then there is the issue of countries that insist that you carry a ‘proof of departure’ ie a ticket to prove that you are leaving the country within the permissible number of days. Again, difficult when you don’t know the day you will exit the tournament that you have come to play. An example of this happened to my player and me only recently. We bought a ‘return’ ticket from London, UK to Barranquilla, Colombia, travelling from London to Miami and then from Miami to Barranquilla. Unsure as to when my player might exit the tournament in Colombia, but knowing that the next tournament was in Cleveland, USA, we included a changeable (but at a price) flight back to the UK from Boston. The total cost of this ticket was £1,600 each – the cheapest we could find – and trust me we looked hard!

Having travelled the first leg of our journey and spent a few hours in Miami, we looked to check in for our flight to Barranquilla only to be asked for our ‘proof of return’. We showed the lady our ticket from Boston to London but were then told this would not suffice as it didn’t prove that we were going to leave Colombia. So despite the fact that we had a ticket from the USA to the UK less than 2 weeks after our planned arrival in Colombia, this was not deemed suitable proof that we were not going to stay in Colombia indefinitely. So, we then had to buy a new ticket from Barranquilla to Miami on a random date to show that we were intending to leave the country. This additional ticket was a further £265 each so just to get to Barranquilla, we had both already forked out £1,865.

Fortunately, we made sure that we bought a fully refundable ticket out of Colombia, and cancelled this ticket within the permitted 24 hour period and got our money back. But this kind of makes a mockery of the fact that you have to buy a ticket to leave, as we could easily have stayed in Colombia had we wanted to once we had cancelled the flight.

Colombia is not alone in seeking ‘proof of departure (or onward travel)’ from all foreigners entering the country; there are very many others, and so it should not come as a surprise. But for professional athletes, such as tennis players, where they cannot know what day they intend to leave due to the nature of their business, it would be useful if the ATP/WTA/ITF could come up with some kind of document/undertaking/explanation that could be presented to the airlines and immigration authorities to give some kind of exemption from the need to purchase a return/onward ticket. Maybe this is unrealistic but the lower level players don’t have an inordinate amount of liquidity, so to have to pay out for return flights, which may or may not be taken, is a real burden on cash flow.

Now (apparently) there are websites which will (for a charge) provide travellers with ‘fake’ return flight receipts but obviously I am not advocating the use of these. Travellers/players use these site at their own risk but I do know of a number of people on the tour that do use these sites to avoid having to incur the expense of purchasing return tickets.

Along a similar vein, is the issue of flights that players buy in good faith but which, for a variety of reasons, never get used and so the money used to buy them is lost. An example of this occurred earlier this summer. My player and I purchased single flights to Sweden as she had a place in the qualifying event there. However, rain delays meant that her match in the previous tournament (in this instance, Wimbledon) got delayed to such an extent that there was no way she could get to the tournament in Sweden on time. As a result, the flights had to be forfeited as there was no refund option. Now obviously, as I have said earlier, players typically don’t buy tickets until they are out of their current tournament but when you can see that the availability of flights is diminishing fast, you sometimes have to make a judgement call. In this instance however, it was expensive one.

So the reality of air travel on the pro tennis tour is that it is very expensive and can be difficult to navigate. Players almost always have to buy tickets ‘last minute’ so cannot usually benefit from budget or ‘sales’ prices. They have to get from A to B at short notice and have to ‘pay the price’. It’s all well and good if they are sponsored by an airline, or know someone who owns a private jet, but such luxuries are limited to the very few and certainly only to those at the top level of the game.

#realitytennis

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