So much so that they have found it necessary to charter a P&O cruise liner, Pacific Sky, to increase their inventory of beds in New Zealand.
With the official match tickets allocated to them, Gullivers has a capacity to handle just over 4,000 clients from the UK, as well as from other parts of the world, and Pacific Sky will provide valuable berths in both Christchurch and Wellington over a two week period for up to 2,000 of these.
By September 2003, however, alarm bells started ringing as the company had so far collected 4,730 bookings and it was clear that there would be difficulty in finding enough resources for many more.
Gullivers had closed off further registrations with deposits and thereafter only allowed clients to join a waiting list in case space became available from any later washout. The result, to 30 May 2004, is that they have just over a further 5,000 lead names who want to follow the tour - and Gullivers estimate that these could conservatively represent a total of around 20,000 more fans!
John Hall, director of Gullivers, said: "Whilst the interest from sports fans to take holidays that also indulge their passion is generally growing, the Lions’ tour is something of a phenomenon and actually outstrips the demand for Rugby World Cup travel.
“Following some market research amongst our clients, we found that many would consider not travelling if they could not be guaranteed to be located in or close to each match venue.
"With that information, we felt that we had to go that extra mile to get more beds where we were short, as opposed to accommodating clients in, say, Auckland and just flying them in and out of Wellington and Christchurch on the day of a match – besides that, it is winter and aircraft movements could get sticky.”
