How many match tickets will be allocated to the Lions and how will these tickets get distributed to the fans?

The administrative running of the tour is carried out by an entity called British Lions Limited (BLL), who are based in Dublin and whose Chief Executive is John Feehan. BLL have been working in conjunction with the Australian Rugby Football Union (ARU) to arrange the practicalities of the tour, ranging from ticket allocations, to hotel accommodation to sponsorship.

BLL have in total been given approximately10,000 test match tickets per test match.

With their allocation, BLL will in turn appoint four Official Travel Agents (OTA’s) to package the tickets with flights and accommodation to form official tours. Agencies are already selling packages for the tour even though they have yet to be confirmed as OTA’s. Due to corporate commitments and the need to satisfy demand for tickets from “within” (i.e. the staff/families of the home unions etc), the final figure for the four OTA’s breaks down to only 75% of the officially allocated tickets for UK based fans for each test match. The allocation of tickets to each OTA is not simply split four ways, as can be seen in the next question.

What this all ultimately means is that if you live in Britain or Ireland, the ONLY legitimate way to purchase match tickets officially is to buy them as part of a package from an OTA, and to this end any other method of acquiring tickets will not have been sanctioned by the BLL or SARFU.