I think ticket prices for the event itself are near the bottom of the list of issues. Airline prices are definitely an issue since it usually costs more to fly to Eugene (or to Portland and rent a car) than a major city but it’s insane to fly anywhere right now so I’m not sure you can fault the organizers too much for that this year. The main issue is the price of accommodations. If you search hotels/Airbnbs for the dates of WCs and then search for the same days of the week a week later, the price difference is drastic. Eugene is so small that hotels/Airbnbs are much more price sensitive to big events coming to town. I did a very unscientific look at the populations of all of the past WC host cities and you can see just how much smaller Eugene is. Except for Helsinki in 2005, the last time the WCs were held in a city with a population of less than 1 million was in 1993. (And yes, I know that I’m using current population and so the populations of all of these places were lower in the past when they held the WCs but I think my point still holds true even if I tried to find historical population data for each city, which I don’t feel like doing.) Similar to what someone said above, I live in San Francisco and it might cost me as much, or less, to go to the WC in Budapest next year.
1983 – Helsinki (658,864)
1987 – Rome (4,342,212)
1991 – Tokyo (13,988,129)
1993 – Stuttgart (630,305)
1995 – Gothenburg (587,549)
1997 – Athens (3,090,508)
1999 – Seville (1,107,000)
2001 – Edmonton (1,010,899)
2003 – Paris (2,165,423)
2005 – Helsinki (658,864)
2007 – Osaka (2,753,862)
2009 – Berlin (3,769,495)
2011 – Daegu (2,446,144)
2013 – Moscow (12,506,468)
2015 – Beijing (21,893,095)
2017 – London (9,002,488)
2019 – Doha (2,382,000)
2022 – Eugene (247,421