The Olympics..........games for the people? Really?

[Frutos]

Anyone who thinks the ticketing has been done properly is talking out of their teatowel holder.

I'll ask again, as you ignored this question the first time around: If you had been successful in getting the tickets for which you applied, would you have posted this thread?

 

[piersa]

I'll ask again, as you ignored this question the first time around: If you had been successful in getting the tickets for which you applied, would you have posted this thread?

You seem to have such a sense of entitlement regarding getting an answer, for no good reason.

 

[Frutos]

You seem to have such a sense of entitlement regarding getting an answer, for no good reason.

Similar to your sense of entitlement around getting tickets then.

 

[sten_super]

I'll ask again, as you ignored this question the first time around: If you had been successful in getting the tickets for which you applied, would you have posted this thread?

Frutos, I got tickets in one of the rounds I applied for (the second round) and I think the ticketing has been a complete farce.

I'm not sure I buy the premise that the organisers couldn't have known how many people would apply for tickets (and therefore they were right not to limit the amount that people could apply for), but lets run with it for the moment. These are the things that I would have done differently;

1) Ask people to prioritise their applications. In R1 allow people to apply for every single event, but make them rank them. Tickets get allocated by priority - all Priority 1 applicants get tickets first, if there are still some left after that Priority 2, etc. If at any stage the number of applicants outnumbers the number of tickets remaining, have a straight ballot between those people.
2) Keep the rules the same for each subsequent round of ticket applications. The first round was a timeless ballot application - it suddenly then changed to first come first served. That's bound to confuse people.
3) Tell people what tickets they have, then take their money. Not the other way round.
4) Outline how many tickets are available in each ticket allocation round, and (in the case of the timeless ballot) outline how many applications there have been (so that people can apply for things that that has low demand).

That's four things off the top of my head; I'm sure there are plenty more. Considering how much money has been thrown at this operation the ticket allocation has been a complete and utter farce. I agree largely with the title of the thread - they've done a fantastic job of frustrating and isolating themselves from large swathes of the general population that were initially very excited about the prospect of seeing part of the Games.

 

[Dr. Notthenineo'clocknews]

Anyone who thinks the ticketing has been done properly is talking out of their teatowel holder.

until this moment I was gonna keep out of this debate, but hey, here's my input................

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

We're never going to get the World Cup, so The Olympics are our only chance of hosting a global event.

I have taken 11th July as holiday to watch the torch relay, will that do?

It's like The Eclipse, these thing come along once in a lifetime, so if you want to, take the opportunity while it presents itself.

 

[Bold Seagull]

We're never going to get the World Cup, so The Olympics are our only chance of hosting a global event.

I have taken 11th July as holiday to watch the torch relay, will that do?

It's like The Eclipse, these thing come along once in a lifetime, so if you want to, take the opportunity while it presents itself.

Given I can't get a ticket for anything, I think it will be the freebies for us too. Maybe go up and see the olympic marathon, the cycling road race etc.

Olympic Free Events

 

[Tooting Gull]

It's not every year you get to put a sexy picture of Rebecca Adlington up in the house.

Just me then...

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

Frutos, I got tickets in one of the rounds I applied for (the second round) and I think the ticketing has been a complete farce.

I'm not sure I buy the premise that the organisers couldn't have known how many people would apply for tickets (and therefore they were right not to limit the amount that people could apply for), but lets run with it for the moment. These are the things that I would have done differently;

1) Ask people to prioritise their applications. In R1 allow people to apply for every single event, but make them rank them. Tickets get allocated by priority - all Priority 1 applicants get tickets first, if there are still some left after that Priority 2, etc. If at any stage the number of applicants outnumbers the number of tickets remaining, have a straight ballot between those people.
2) Keep the rules the same for each subsequent round of ticket applications. The first round was a timeless ballot application - it suddenly then changed to first come first served. That's bound to confuse people.
3) Tell people what tickets they have, then take their money. Not the other way round.
4) Outline how many tickets are available in each ticket allocation round, and (in the case of the timeless ballot) outline how many applications there have been (so that people can apply for things that that has low demand).

That's four things off the top of my head; I'm sure there are plenty more. Considering how much money has been thrown at this operation the ticket allocation has been a complete and utter farce. I agree largely with the title of the thread - they've done a fantastic job of frustrating and isolating themselves from large swathes of the general population that were initially very excited about the prospect of seeing part of the Games.

I think the organisers did what you asked for in stage 1. There's no need to go any further because it's almost guarenteed that for stadium events demand will outstrip supply.

It doesn't really matter the order of advising tickets and payments, if you are awarded 4 or 400 there's NO recourse to opt out, so you have to pay for what you are awarded. It would have taken an e-mail to every applicant ( all x millions of them ), successful or otherwise, probably many people don't have e-mail. Can you imagine the cost of postage x 2, once for the notification, one for the tickets. This way round, the cost is less than halved. Only tickets are posted out, rejections are not.

 

[piersa]

Similar to your sense of entitlement around getting tickets then.

bless you for not seeing the irony, bless you

 

[Hatterlovesbrighton]

Frutos, I got tickets in one of the rounds I applied for (the second round) and I think the ticketing has been a complete farce.

I'm not sure I buy the premise that the organisers couldn't have known how many people would apply for tickets (and therefore they were right not to limit the amount that people could apply for), but lets run with it for the moment. These are the things that I would have done differently;

1) Ask people to prioritise their applications. In R1 allow people to apply for every single event, but make them rank them. Tickets get allocated by priority - all Priority 1 applicants get tickets first, if there are still some left after that Priority 2, etc. If at any stage the number of applicants outnumbers the number of tickets remaining, have a straight ballot between those people.
2) Keep the rules the same for each subsequent round of ticket applications. The first round was a timeless ballot application - it suddenly then changed to first come first served. That's bound to confuse people.
3) Tell people what tickets they have, then take their money. Not the other way round.
4) Outline how many tickets are available in each ticket allocation round, and (in the case of the timeless ballot) outline how many applications there have been (so that people can apply for things that that has low demand).

That's four things off the top of my head; I'm sure there are plenty more. Considering how much money has been thrown at this operation the ticket allocation has been a complete and utter farce. I agree largely with the title of the thread - they've done a fantastic job of frustrating and isolating themselves from large swathes of the general population that were initially very excited about the prospect of seeing part of the Games.

1 is a nice idea but would have been hugely complicated and would have just lead to multiple applications i.e. one person getting all their mates to apply on his behalf for very popular tickets.

3. You're effectively giving people a right of refusal, which would have just lead to everyone putting in spurious applications for tickets they maybe only kinda wanted so they could pick and choose later on.

4. Agree with this, though hard and possibly deceptive half way through the application round to tell people which are popular and which aren't as I might all have changed anyway.

It's also not like there are people out there that got dozens of tickets. Even the people that tried to buy £5k worth of the top price tickets only eneded up gettting 1/3 of what they wanted. The demand was just that high.

What I'm glad about (and hope it continues) is that there have been very few stories so far about touts trying to sell Olympic tickets for huge prices.

 

[sten_super]

I think the organisers did what you asked for in stage 1. There's no need to go any further because it's almost guarenteed that for stadium events demand will outstrip supply.

Nope, they most certainly didn't. I know no-one that got any tickets for anything in the first round, and some of them applied for thousands of pounds worth of tickets (I applied for £800 worth and got nada).

It doesn't really matter the order of advising tickets and payments, if you are awarded 4 or 400 there's NO recourse to opt out, so you have to pay for what you are awarded. It would have taken an e-mail to every applicant, successful or otherwise, probably many people don't have e-mail. Can you imagine the cost of postage x 2, once for the notification, one for the tickets. This way round, the cost is halved.

My point was not that it mattered (in the sense that it would effect what people got) but that it was yet another thing that they mismanaged. People checked bank balances and tried to guess what they had got, only to find out either it was nothing (they'd miscounted) or that instead of the 10m diving final that they'd dreamed about it was the first round of the women's football.

I accept that, when demand outstrips supply, some people are going to miss out, and some of them will be unhappy. My point was that they got significant parts of the process badly wrong and helped to put people off and generally disengaged them from the process of hosting the games. To pretend that this is not the case is fundamentally wrong, IMHO.

 

[piersa]

1 is a nice idea but would have been hugely complicated and would have just lead to multiple applications i.e. one person getting all their mates to apply on his behalf for very popular tickets.

3. You're effectively giving people a right of refusal, which would have just lead to everyone putting in spurious applications for tickets they maybe only kinda wanted so they could pick and choose later on.

4. Agree with this, though hard and possibly deceptive half way through the application round to tell people which are popular and which aren't as I might all have changed anyway.

It's also not like there are people out there that got dozens of tickets. Even the people that tried to buy £5k worth of the top price tickets only eneded up gettting 1/3 of what they wanted. The demand was just that high.

What I'm glad about (and hope it continues) is that there have been very few stories so far about touts trying to sell Olympic tickets for huge prices.

Hatterloves brighton is THE authority on worldwide ticketing strategy, why oh why did locog not employ him. Madness.

 

[Easy 10]

People who didn't get tickets and wanted them now would be pissed off and will be calling the system rubbish.

People who wanted tickets and got them will say what other way is there of doing the system?

So, to anyone criticising the ticketing process, what would you have done instead?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

There was a world BEFORE the internet. If I was in charge, then sales of tickets over the internet would have been BINNED from the offset, in favour of a national ticketing system where you turned up at a designated kiosk in your town or city and physically QUEUED for the tickets you wanted. Radical eh.

The reason it was so massively oversubscribed is because it was too piss-easy for every lazyarse in the country to sit there nonchalently clicking away to get tickets to some event or other, whether they were actually bothered about it or not.

Selling tickets at national ticket kiosks across the country would've made it a national even in itself. You could've had British athetes turning up for meet & greets in the queues, burger vans, beer tents, drugs, the lot. It would have been BRILLIANT. Instead everyone just got a tedious bloody website where you had to risk stumping up a few grand for some tickets to the Handball if you wanted to see anything worthwhile.

Opportunity missed. It doesn't always HAVE to be about the internet does it ?

 

[NickBHAFC18]

I couldn't be less interested if I tried. Simply can't understand why anyone wants to go and watch things like fencing, judo, etc if they're not fans of those sports in the first place. The fact that it's so expensive and likely to be a logistical nightmare leads me to think that settling for a daily review/highlights show on my nice, big hd tellybox will do just fine!

I'm the same. Never go out my way to watch the Olympics, the only event that interests me are the sprints and the football.

 

[sten_super]

1 is a nice idea but would have been hugely complicated and would have just lead to multiple applications i.e. one person getting all their mates to apply on his behalf for very popular tickets.

I'm sorry, I really don't believe that it would have been hugely complicated. I'm not that good at Excel but I'm fairly sure that I could implement it (on a small scale) in that. Given the amount that they spent on the organisation, and the amount of time they took to tell people what tickets they got, it's not beyond the wit of man. I don't think that mates applying on others behalf would have happened much more than it did anyway.

3. You're effectively giving people a right of refusal, which would have just lead to everyone putting in spurious applications for tickets they maybe only kinda wanted so they could pick and choose later on.

You're only giving people right of refusal if they are willing to close down their bank account and move to another bank (as within the same bank they'd track you down easily enough). How many people do you think realistically would have done that? Besides which, you'd have to give up all your tickets, and, if they'd also implemented my first suggestion, people would have been much less likely to get tickets for things they didn't really want anyway.

4. Agree with this, though hard and possibly deceptive half way through the application round to tell people which are popular and which aren't as I might all have changed anyway.

Again, I don't think it's beyond the wit of man to have a live (or nearly live, say updated every 3 days) database of the total number of applicants (and their priority band, if they'd done that) for each event.

It's also not like there are people out there that got dozens of tickets. Even the people that tried to buy £5k worth of the top price tickets only eneded up gettting 1/3 of what they wanted. The demand was just that high.

Perhaps you are right - but as I mention above it's as much about perception as what actually happened. They've made the process complicated and given a perception of unevenness that I really think could have been relatively straightforwardly avoided.

What I'm glad about (and hope it continues) is that there have been very few stories so far about touts trying to sell Olympic tickets for huge prices.

I can certainly agree with that!

 

[piersa]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

There was a world BEFORE the internet. If I was in charge, then sales of tickets over the internet would have been BINNED from the offset, in favour of a national ticketing system where you turned up at a designated kiosk in your town or city and physically QUEUED for the tickets you wanted. Radical eh.

The reason it was so massively oversubscribed is because it was too piss-easy for every lazyarse in the country to sit there nonchalently clicking away to get tickets to some event or other, whether they were actually bothered about it or not.

Selling tickets at national ticket kiosks across the country would've made it a national even in itself. You could've had British athetes turning up for meet & greets in the queues, burger vans, beer tents, drugs, the lot. It would have been BRILLIANT. Instead everyone just got a tedious bloody website where you had to risk stumping up a few grand for some tickets to the Handball if you wanted to see anything worthwhile.

Opportunity missed. It doesn't always HAVE to be about the internet does it ?

but it is about money and your idea would have cost them a lot more.

 

[Easy 10]

but it is about money and your idea would have cost them a lot more.

Could've been quite a moneyspinner in itself, with Olympic beer tents, food outlets and souveniers / tat to sell to the queuing punters.

 

[hans kraay fan club]

Shame whining about tickets isn't one of the events, really.

 

[Hatterlovesbrighton]

but it is about money and your idea would have cost them a lot more.

Would have cost them far less actually. No expensive IT to run etc. LOCOG have said though that the last batch of tickets will be sold at box-offices so Easy 10 will get his wish.