Demand no excuse for latest 2012 ticket fiasco
LONDON 2012 organisers should have been well equipped to cope with the high demand for second hand Olympic tickets, industry experts said yesterday.
Games chiefs Locog were forced to suspend the official re-sale portal, which remained offline last night, designed to allow customers the chance to sell on any unwanted tickets at face value just hours after it opened last Friday.
Thousands of customers logged on to the site last week only to be frustrated in their attempts to use the service and chief executive of online ticket exchange Seatwave, Joe Cohen, believes there is no way the system should have buckled, even if Locog underestimated the traffic they were likely to experience.
“I get the impression the problems we’ve seen with the re-sale system are very little to do with volume of interest,” Cohen told City PM “The demand can still be high but if you speculate that of the six million tickets that have been purchased so far by just over a million people, let’s say an outlandish proportion of around 20 per cent wanted to offload their tickets – that’s around 250,000 people.
“And even if all those people logged on at the same time that’s a weight of traffic that a business like ours and others in the industry would be able to and are designed to cope with comfortably.”
Locog are currently working with their official ticketing partner Ticketmaster to resolve the problems with the service but were unable to put a date on when it would be up and running again.
Those who bought tickets directly from Locog should be able to submit their tickets for re-sale on the 2012 ticketing website until 3 February.