Greg Hansen: Tournament travel requires planes, trains, automobiles — and cash

First: Tickets to Thursday’s Arizona-Xavier game are sold out, but you can search the secondary market for upper-deck seats starting at $150 each. Good seats? Think $600.

Second: The average Silicon Valley hotel room is $300 a night this week. If you want to be close to the SAP Center, it’s $400.

Third: If you’re in Tucson and don’t know the way to San Jose — or hope to accompany the Wildcats to future Sweet 16s or Final Fours — here are two names you need to know: Joyce Hammer and Katie Clark.

Hammer and Clark sounds like a firm that can get difficult things done right now. In their roles for Bon Voyage/UA Wildcat Travel, Hammer and Clark have arranged planes, trains and automobiles — not to mention buses, hotels and ticket sales — for every Arizona NCAA Tournament dating to 1988.

“At the 1988 Final Four in Kansas City, our first year, we got a hotel in Olathe, Kansas,” Clark remembers. “It was in a dry county. We had to hijack a bus just to get a cocktail.”

All these years later, after 27 NCAA Tournaments, the Bon Voyage/UA group has seen it all.

“We chartered a 747 and three other planes to the 1997 Final Four in Indianapolis and had about 1,700 people in our group,” says Bon Voyage founder Peter Evans. “We commandeered 22 buses from the hotels to the arena.”

Sometimes it doesn’t go quite so well: After Arizona’s 1995 first-round loss to Miami of Ohio, the Bon Voyage group was stuck in Dayton, Ohio, for an extra day when their charter plane was delayed in Mexico with mechanical problems.

There is an art to the NCAA basketball travel business. You’ve got to know the turf and you’ve got to be as quick as Steph Curry’s first step.

The NCAA allotted Arizona 1,000 tickets for the West Regional in San Jose. The UA distributed 625 to Wildcat Club members on a priority points system, 125 to students and uses the remaining for internal purposes, including family members of Wildcat players.

If you got one of those 625 tickets, you needed travel arrangements yesterday.

“It’s such a quick turnaround from last week in Salt Lake to this week in San Jose, but we sent a group to San Jose (Tuesday) and another group (Wednesday),” says Ryan Hansen, president of Bon Voyage and a former UA basketball manager and director of basketball operations.

“The unknown can be very stressful. Two years ago, we sold out three Final Four charter planes between Arizona’s Sweet 16 victory over Xavier and its Elite Eight game against Wisconsin. We had to ask: ‘Are you in if Arizona wins?’”

That’s in and then some.

The Sweet 16 isn’t often comparable to, say the Pac-12 Tournament in Las Vegas, when an estimated 12,000 UA fans were at T-Mobile Arena, although Arizona fans occupied about 10,000 seats at Staples Center for 2015 Sweet 16/Elite Eight.

Most weekends in the NCAA Tournament are neither convenient, cost-efficient nor predictable, especially when Arizona doesn’t play in Las Vegas or Los Angeles.

“In the 30 years we’ve done it, Arizona has lost in every possible position, from first round to the Final Four,” says Evans, a UA grad whose son, Sean, was the Gonzaga student manager for Mark Few. “If Arizona loses the last game and everything goes perfect on our trip, people are still unhappy. But if a few things go wrong and Arizona wins, it’s a great trip.”

At the 1994 Final Four, a large Bon Voyage/UA group was booked into a Charlotte hotel owned by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. No alcohol was available. Wake-up calls began with “Jesus Loves You,” which didn’t suit the faith of all members of Arizona’s group.

“We almost got evicted,” Evans remembers, laughing. “And then Arizona lost, which made it worse.”

The biggest challenge for those who book UA travel to the NCAA Tournament: committing to charter planes. It costs Evans’ group about $100,000 to reserve a charter — or about $1,000 per traveler — and that’s before it has a single Arizona fan on a sign-up list.

As a UA partner, Bon Voyage Wildcat Travel, which has an office at McKale Center, is able to book its customers into the team hotel. After more than 15 years working for Arizona’s basketball program, much of it involved with basketball travel, Hansen has learned to simultaneously stay in the moment and also plan for next week’s games.

“At the 2005 Elite Eight in Chicago and again in 2011 in Anaheim, I attended the NCAA meetings in which you get a full briefing on what to expect at the Final Four,” Hansen says. “You start the process of hotels, security, transportation, even the trophy presentation. Everything’s right there; you can almost taste it.

“And then, poof, you miss a last-second shot and it all goes away.”