Millennium Dome hands out free tickets to backers’ staff

Sponsors of the Millennium Dome are giving away thousands of free and discounted tickets to staff.

BT, which spent £12m on the Dome’s Talk Zone, will offer all of its 124,000 employees a free admission ticket, worth £20, or a £20 discount on the family ticket, which admits two adults and three children for £57.

Pharmaceutical company Roche is a support sponsor in the Body Zone and will offer its 2,500 UK staff free entrance tickets.

A Roche spokeswoman says: “Obviously not all of them are going to take up the offer because of where they live or personal circumstances.”

Tesco, Marks & Spencer and Ford will also offer their employees tickets at discounted prices, with between ten and 45 per cent off.

A spokesman for the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC), which manages the Dome, says all the sponsors were given an allocation of free tickets according to how much they had spent on sponsorship.

The spokesman refuses to reveal how many tickets have been allocated to each sponsor but says they are “not huge figures”. He says sponsors would have had to pay full price for tickets acquired above the allocation.

NMEC is refusing to say how many tickets have been sold since they went on sale, but agents have reported slow sales. The company needs to attract 12 million visitors next year to break even.