Thousands of London 2012 swimming tickets oversold

[richard]

Organisers of the London 2012 Olympics have admitted that they have oversold 10,000 tickets for synchronised swimming at the Games, forcing them to contact thousands of successful applicants and offer them alternatives.

Organisers have admitted that due to "human error" during the second phase of ticket sales last June, when remaining tickets were offered on a first come first served basis, the computerised ticketing system was told that there was 20,000 instead of 10,000 tickets left across four sessions.

Since last month, organisers have been contacting around 3,000 purchasers of the oversold tickets to offer them replacement tickets for other events for which they had unsuccessfully applied. Those tickets are believed to have been taken from a contingency supply of tickets released back into the system once final seat configurations have been finalised in the venues.

"As a result of finalising the seating configurations in our venues and reconciling the millions of Olympic and Paralympic ticket orders against the seating plans for around 1,000 sporting sessions, we have discovered an error in seats available in four synchronised swimming sessions," said a London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) spokesman.

"In December we contacted around 3,000 customers who had applied for tickets in the four sessions during the second round sales process. We are exchanging their synchronised swimming tickets for tickets in other sports that they originally applied for."

Locog is believed to have double-checked every other ticket sale to ensure the error was not repeated and is confident only the synchronised swimming sessions were affected.

All of those offered alternative tickets so far – some likely to be for events that they would consider more attractive – are believed to have taken up the offer.

The error is the latest controversy to hit the ticketing process, which has proved one of the most problematic elements of the Games preparations.

Locog has repeatedly defended the ticketing process from claims of bias toward those able to bid large amounts of money for large numbers of tickets, and are able to point to the fact they have already banked £537m toward their £670m target.

Locog chief executive Paul Deighton has said the final statistics show the distribution of tickets was fair and pointed to the number of cheap tickets and concessions available. During the initial deluge, there were 22m applications for the 3m tickets available.

Locog chairman Lord Coe has promised at least two-thirds of the original 1.9m applicants in the first phase of the ballot would get a ticket.

A total of 6.6m tickets are available to the public across 26 sports. A further 2.2m are available to other competing nations, International Olympic Committee officials and sponsors. At present, football is the only sport yet to sell out.

The final batch of 1.2m tickets across all events will go on sale in April, with those who failed to secure tickets in earlier sales rounds given priority. It is from that allocation that those offered replacements for their oversold synchronised swimming tickets will be sold tickets.

On Friday, organisers will launch a ticket resale scheme for those who have bought tickets but are no longer able to use them.


Source
By Owen Gibson
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