Hot ticket (but good luck getting one)

Hoping to get tickets to the Bowl Championship Series title game Jan. 10 in Glendale, Ariz., if Oregon beats archrival Oregon State in Corvallis on Saturday?

Good luck.

The University of Oregon will get about 17,000 tickets to the game — roughly half the allotment that the UO received for last season’s Rose Bowl game. And only 12,500 of the $345 tickets are being made available to the longest-tenured season ticket holders who donate the most money, said Garrett Klassy, executive director of the Duck Athletic Fund. The rest are reserved for players, coaches, UO administrators, Alumni Association officials and other well-connected Duck fans.

However, if you want to pay some serious money and buy tickets already purchased by someone else, that will likely be easier than getting a flight out of Eugene to Phoenix, Ariz., in the days leading up to college football’s national championship game.

“Oh, yeah — totally full,” Kathy Rise, an agent with Lee World Travel, said of Eugene-to-Phoenix flights between Jan. 5 and Jan. 9. Fans have been booking flights for the past month, she said. “People have just really started calling and gobbling them up.”

“Our phones have been ringing off the hook,” said agent Juanita Clark of Eugene’s Sunrise Travel. “Phoenix is getting sold out, so people are looking at flying into Palm Springs and (Las) Vegas and Tucson.”

Asked Tuesday to find a round-trip flight out of Eugene to Phoenix in the days before the Jan. 10 game and returning the day after, Clark found one — for $1,114.80!

That was on a sold-out United Airlines flight Jan. 8 from Eugene to Denver to Phoenix, and returning Jan. 11 through San Francisco. The seats were available because airlines typically “overbook” flights to compensate for no-shows, Clark said.

Yes, there’s still the little detail of the beloved, undefeated and No. 1-ranked Ducks needing to dispatch OSU’s Beavers in Saturday’s 114th version of the Civil War. But that hasn’t stopped confident UO fans from booking lots of flights, and reserving lots of hotel rooms, in the Phoenix area.

“I haven’t put it on my calendar yet because I don’t want to jinx it,” Tenille Woodward of Eugene said Tuesday. But Woodward and her husband, Steve Woodward, bought plane tickets to Phoenix two months ago, after the Ducks defeated Stanford, the highest-ranked opponent on their schedule, 52-31 at Autzen Stadium on Oct. 2.

The couple, who have season tickets to home UO football games, got $178 round-trip flights on Alaska Airlines from Eugene to Phoenix via Seattle on Jan. 8, returning via Portland on Jan. 11, the day after the game.

But what if the Beavers pull the all-time upset in Civil War history?

“If (the Ducks) lose, there’s only a $75 change fee,” said Steve Woodward, a sales associate at the Fox News affiliate in Eugene, of Alaska Airlines’ flight-change policy. Other airlines charge as much as $150.

Although hotel reservations can be canceled last-minute without penalty, airline tickets are nonrefundable. They retain their value, minus a change fee, for up to a year.

“It’s still not a bad place to go even if things don’t work out,” Klassy said of Phoenix, where the average temperature in January is 66 degrees and the all-time high for the month is a toasty 88.

Eugene School District Superintendent George Russell, a UO season ticket holder, also booked airline tickets to Phoenix in mid-November for himself and his wife. “And I’m hoping I get to use (them),” Russell said. The Russells have reserved seats on a Jan. 9 United Airlines flight to Phoenix via San Francisco. Russell said he was a tad nervous watching the Ducks, who trailed 19-14 at halftime, against Arizona at Autzen last Friday.

Russell and other Duck fans don’t want to miss a first-ever national title game appearance for the UO, though. So they’re buying early.

Longtime UO fan Tim Wenzl bought plane tickets on US Air for himself and his wife, Judy, a month ago. “I didn’t want to wait until after the Beaver game when everybody was hitting (the airlines),” Wenzl said.

The couple also have reservations at two different hotels in Glendale, where the championship game will be played at 72,200-seat University of Phoenix Stadium, home of the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals. If the Ducks go, the Wenzls will keep one of their hotel reservations and cancel the other. If the Ducks lose, well, that’s two canceled reservations.

Calls on Tuesday to five hotels near University of Phoenix Stadium found no vacancies. A request for a room on Jan. 9 and Jan. 10 at the 274-room Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa just a quarter-mile northeast of the stadium was answered with: “I’m showing we’ve sold out those nights.”

Same response from the nearby Hampton Inn & Suites, the Holiday Inn Express & Suites, the Springhill Suites By Marriott and the Staybridge Suites.

That’s why the Woodwards have reserved a condominium in Phoenix, although they’re hoping a friend who has another condo within walking distance of the stadium will come through and let them stay there for free.

And if the Ducks lose Saturday? The Woodwards instead will drive to the Rose Bowl to see the UO most likely play Big Ten champion Wisconsin, thus saving their plane tickets for the 2011 season-opener against LSU at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas, Steve Woodward said.

Rise at Lee World Travel said the agency hasn’t gotten any calls for the Rose Bowl. “I guess we’ll find out Monday,” she said.

UO season ticket holder Jerry Wilson, who’s been following UO football since he was a first-grader in the mid-1940s, and who already has his Jan. 7 Phoenix-bound tickets, said: “This is a terrible thing to say, but the Rose Bowl doesn’t excite me much anymore.”