Olympics organisers forced to defend ticketing process

Early morning deluge of applicants for 2.3 million tickets for London 2012 Olympic Games causes website to grind to halt Organisers of the London 2012 Olympics were forced to defend the event’s ticketing process again after an early morning deluge of applicants for the 2.3m tickets available to those who missed out in the first round caused the website to grind to a halt. Overwhelming demand for the remaining tickets caused many of the 1.2 million people eligible to apply for them to take to the airwaves, the internet and Twitter to register their anger after they were confronted with messages telling them to try again later. But protests from those who had risen at 6am to try to get their hands on the tickets available, of which only 600,000 were not for the football tournament, subsided within an hour as their transactions began to go through more easily. A spokeswoman for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (Locog) said transactions continued to be processed from 6am onwards but such was the demand that some were held back to avoid overloading the system. By mid-afternoon, the only tickets remaining were for football, volleyball, boxing, wrestling and weightlifting. The 40,000 remaining athletics tickets were snapped up most rapidly in this second first come, first served phase of ticketing. The second chance sale offered tickets for 310 sessions, including 44 medal events. The 1.2 million people eligible to apply during the current 10-day window were those who tried and failed to secure tickets in the first round ballot. During that process, which came in for criticism from the public and some consumer groups for its lack of transparency and for deducting money before buyers were notified what their tickets were for, 700,000 people secured 3m tickets. Those people will be offered another chance to buy any remaining tickets from 8 July, but look likely to be left only with tickets for football and a handful of other sports. Yesterday’s applicants face an anxious wait over the next 48 hours for confirmation from Locog that they have been allocated the tickets they applied for. Bradley Wiggins, the three times Olympic gold medal cyclist, criticised the ticketing system. “I think, as most of the public feels, it’s a bit of a shambles,” he told the BBC. “It’s a shame when you know what works so successfully in other Olympic Games, certainly Athens, that they couldn’t implement those here.” But the London 2012 chairman, Lord Coe, has said that while he understood the disappointment of those who have missed out, organisers have been satisfied with the way tickets have been distributed. Another tranche of around 1.2m tickets will go on sale from December once the final venue layouts have been finalised. Of the overall total of 8.8m tickets, 6.6m have been reserved for sale to the British public. Of the rest, roughly half are distributed overseas and the rest go to sponsors and the “Olympic family”. But for the biggest finals, fewer than half of the tickets have been made available to the general public owing to the demands of sponsors, the media and IOC officials. London Olympic Games 2012 Owen Gibson guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 24, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.