China revises Olympic ticketing after system crash

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Nov 5, 2007, 11:46 GMT

Beijing - Organisers of the 2008 Olympics on Monday revised the Chinese ticketing procedures after a flood of applications crashed the computerised booking system and forced them to suspend sales last week. The Beijing organising committee (BOCOG) said it would resume second-phase sales in China on December 10 but would dispense with the chaotic 'first come, first served' system used last week. Tickets will now be issued through a lottery, as they were in the first phase, after applications close on December 30. 'The ticketing policy modifications aim to reflect a people-oriented policy and to adhere to principles of fairness, impartiality, and convenience to the public,' BOCOG said in a statement posted on its website. 'BOCOG has taken into consideration technical verification and research by specialists as well as comments and suggestions from various parties in making the policy adjustments,' it said. The ticketing services are a joint venture between US-based TicketMaster and two Chinese firms. Millions of applicants swamped the website, hotline and designated banks when sales opened last Tuesday. BOCOG's ticketing website recorded eight million page views in the first hour, an average of 200,000 hits per minute on Tuesday morning. More than 3.8 million calls were made to its telephone hotline on Tuesday morning, while many applicants queued outside Bank of China branches in Beijing to wait for a chance to book some of the 1.85 million tickets offered. In the first phase earlier this year, BOCOG sold about 1.59 million tickets to Olympic events and all the tickets for the opening and closing ceremonies. More than seven million tickets are to be sold for the 2008 Games, about 40 per cent of them in China, with an expected revenue of 140 million dollars (97 million euros). To make the tickets affordable for ordinary Chinese citizens, the price for 58 per cent of the seats was set at 100 yuan (13 dollars) or lower. Prices for the 28 sporting events range from 30 to 1,000 yuan, while tickets to the August 8 opening ceremony cost up to 5,000 yuan. Fourteen per cent of the tickets are reserved for students at a price of 10 yuan or less. © 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

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