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

[piersa]

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.

you are clearly plucking that out of thin air.

 

[piersa]

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

true enough.

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

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).

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.

Just 'cos you don't know anyone winning the first ballot just means that you and everyone you know were in the rejection pile, doesn't automatically imply that the tickets weren't oversubscribed. It infers the tickets were oversubscribed because if they WEREN'T oversubscribed you WOULD have got some of what you wanted.

Don't apply for something you don't want to go to. Why apply for event X if you really want to go to event Y - you just end up disappointing the people who really want to go to event X as their odds against getting their preference are increased.

No ballot process will ever satisfy 100% of the people 100% of the time. What do you want, a single transferable vote system for picking an event - still doesn't ensure you get a ticket.

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

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 ?

Do you want to be at the back of a queue of 10,000 people? It took me nearly 4 hours to queue for a replay ticket in '83 and you want that on a Nationwide scale. Madness. Who's left to run the country whilst this is going on?

 

[Easy 10]

Do you want to be at the back of a queue of 10,000 people? It took me nearly 4 hours to queue for a replay ticket in '83 and you want that on a Nationwide scale. Madness. Who's left to run the country whilst this is going on?

I wonder how we EVER managed to get tickets to massive sporting events before the internet ever came along. It was clearly an impossible task beyond the wit of man.

Did you get your ticket in 83 ? Did you deserve it ? If the answer to those questions is "yes" then there's no reason why people couldn't join queues up and down the nation to buy tickets to the Olympics. Limit them to no more than, say, 6 per peron. Jobs a goodun.

The trouble is, people are just too damn LAZY nowadays. Anything more than pointing and clicking and having the tickets delivered to the door and they're throwing an eppy.

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

I did get it and I also got a (little) bollocking for missing a whole morning of school.

To be fair our Head understood and let most people off saturday school to go to Wembley as he said " it'll never happen again....... "

 

[sten_super]

Just 'cos you don't know anyone winning the first ballot just means that you and everyone you know were in the rejection pile, doesn't automatically imply that the tickets weren't oversubscribed. It infers the tickets were oversubscribed because if they WEREN'T oversubscribed you WOULD have got some of what you wanted.

That was in response to your suggestion that they had done what I suggested for the first round - my point was that there was clearly no prioritisation because no-one I know got any tickets. If they'd prioritised it to try to ensure that most people got at least one ticket someone I know probably would have got one.

Don't apply for something you don't want to go to. Why apply for event X if you really want to go to event Y - you just end up disappointing the people who really want to go to event X as their odds against getting their preference are increased.

The scheme was designed to encourage (those that could afford to) to apply for as much as possible, that's exactly what I'm trying to get at (and stop, with my suggestions). If I'd had to prioritise my purchases then I wouldn't be denying anyone else that really wants to go to an event, and if I'd had some inkling as to how likely I was to get tickets for any given event I may again have limited my applications.

Going beyond my initial post - if people had known at the start what we know now there would have been FAR fewer applications in the first round. Why bother applying for £2000 worth of tickets and risk getting a ticket for an event you aren't that bothered about when you could apply for those you really want (100m final) and then if you don't get them get first dibs in the second round? Unfortunately nowhere did it say that unsuccessful applicants would get first choice of the leftovers (because the organising committee were making it up on the hoof) so in the end loads of people applied for loads of tickets.

You can blame human nature if you want - but ultimately you're not going to be able to change that. LOCOG could, however, have designed a system that mitigated it as far as possible and ensured as many people as possible could go to an event (as they initially said they would). They didn't.

 

[willow147]

Save money and travelling time and watch it on the TV. after all, when the event is happening a pool/track/pitch in England is no different to a pool/track/pitch in China.

 

[TheJasperCo]

Save money and travelling time and watch it on the TV. after all, when the event is happening a pool/track/pitch in England is no different to a pool/track/pitch in China.

That's not the attitude to take, really is it? I mean, let's say every Brighton home game was streamed live on TV next season. Surely, you'd still want to go and support your club and soak up the atmosphere. I'd argue it's much the same with the Olympics, only a once in a lifetime opportunity to watch some fantastic sport over the summer. If you have the money, and can get a ticket for a day out up in London for one day over the weekend, I would go for it.

 

[Hatterlovesbrighton]

Save money and travelling time and watch it on the TV. after all, when the event is happening a pool/track/pitch in England is no different to a pool/track/pitch in China.

So i'm guessing that you approved of the plans for a Premiership 39th fixture on foreign soil.

 

[34064 Fighter Command]

The Channel tunnel makes the prospect of getting to the Games from France a much more realistic proposition. Bearing that in mind, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of tickets awarded in the ballot process have headed across the English Channel.

 

[Hatterlovesbrighton]

you are clearly plucking that out of thin air.

Er not really. Compare the costs. Rent of a dozen huts and the wages of the people to go in them or paying an IT contractor to develop a complicated ticketing system and then a huge team of staff to run all the ballots and then print and post out the tickets.

 

[Hatterlovesbrighton]

The Channel tunnel makes the prospect of getting to the Games from France a much more realistic proposition. Bearing that in mind, it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of tickets awarded in the ballot process have headed across the English Channel.

Apparently 97% of applications for the first ballot were from the UK. Can imagine a fair few of the 3% would be from expats but would think France might have made up some of the rest.

Each country gets their own batch of tickets to sell as well through their own Olympic Association but they get to charge a 20% markup.