Friday, August 3, 2012

Empty seats at Olympics as 2.5M seek tickets daily

About 2.5 million people a day are fighting to get their hands on Olympic tickets with pressure on the ticketing website running right through the night, organizers said.

Demand appears to have been boosted by Team Great Britain's strong performance in the medal standings and the start of the track and field events in the main stadium on Friday.

Frustration with an online system that has been unable to cope with demand has been compounded by television footage of empty seats in so-called accredited areas set aside for Olympic officials, sports federations, national Olympic committees, athletes and the media.

Military drafted in to fill empty seats at London Olympics

  1. Only on NBCNews.com

    1. Eagle Scouts split over returning medals in protest
    2. Updated 116 minutes ago 8/3/2012 5:30:48 PM +00:00 Child labor: Small hands legally picking our food
    3. An Internet sales tax is all but inevitable
    4. On a mission: Jogging across the US in name of veterans
    5. Baby elephant orphaned in slaughter finds a foster mom
    6. Supporters, opponents face off over Chick-fil-A
    7. A hotel? An archaeology site? Or both?

London Olympic organizers (LOCOG) have asked those who do not intend to use their seats in these area to give them up, and have trimmed the seating in an effort to make more tickets available to the public.

But one in five of the accredited seats remained empty on Thursday.

Slideshow: Olympic Emotional Moments (on this page)

LOCOG urged sports fans to persevere.

"A lot of them are applying for the same things, so obviously as they get to the check-out, they find that someone else has pipped them to the post and the product is not there that they've ordered," a spokeswoman told reporters on Friday.

More London 2012 coverage from NBCNews.com

She said 100,000 tickets had been sold during a 48-hour period, but tens of thousands remained.

"So it is about persistence," she said.

"People are going into the system, they are successfully buying tickets, they are successfully attending the Games.

"But the sheer volume of people on the site, all through the day, and all through the night, by the way, is vast."

Slideshow: Graffiti Games: UK street artists take on Olympics (on this page)

LOCOG has reclaimed thousands of accredited seats, including 2,400 for athletics, and sold them within hours.

The last-minute sales have boosted the occupancy rate in accredited areas from 60 percent on Tuesday to 81 percent on Thursday. No figures were available for earlier in the week, when vacancies were at their highest.

About 75 percent of the total 8.8 million tickets were sold to the British public. Spectator occupancy in all venues was 92 percent on Thursday.

Video: Olympic medalists face taxes on winnings (on this page)

LOCOG put another 275,000 tickets on sale this week, mainly for soccer, which became available after logistics such as TV camera positions were sorted out.

Friday and Saturday are expected to be the busiest days so far at the Games, with 200,000 people in the Olympic Park, up from 135,000 on Thursday.

More London 2012 stories:

How Muslim Olympians cope during Ramadan

As costly collectibles, Olympic torches are on fire

Olympics bring pride, hope to Afghanistan

Medals for poets? Not at this Olympics but...

Good, bad, ugly? Street artists weigh in on Olympics

London's funny mayor is taken very seriously

(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2012. Click For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48482905/ns/world_news-london_2012_hosting_the_games/

powerball results pebble beach golf beverly hilton roland martin whitney houston dead at 48 whitney houston dead 2012 whitney houston passed away

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.