2:07 AM
Shweta Pandey
Anyone else on the Olympic ticket emotional rollercoaster?
One day I was overwhelmed with buyer remorse, panicking that my order was rather over-ambitious and over-extended.
The next day I was feeling all smug – safe in the knowledge that I did the right thing by picking out cycling, swimming, the men’s 100m final – for they are the truly must have tickets.
The day of reckoning is nigh for all of us. In the next few days the London 2012 Olympic Games organisers will be either ripping money out of my account or leaving it alone. Either way I win.
It’s tickets or a non-overdrawn account.
On the upside I can see where Locog has tried to be fair – offering a ballot system for the oversubscribed sessions, rather than favouring the computer experts able to manipulate systems to score the best seats in a first in best dressed system.
But there are plenty of twists in this particular ride. I still can’t fathom why they can’t tell us what we have secured at the same time as taking the money out.
They surely know what sessions have been allocated to each applicant in order take the money, so why the time lag and secrecy for another month?
Surely it’s not to create a massive sense of disappointment and a collective frenzy from those who missed out to sell the remaining less attractive seats?
Wouldn’t it have been simplier for Locog to give out ticket information as they process batches of orders, rather than have one big email-out on or before June 24?
Adding to the sudden drop in confidence is all purchasers have to wait an entire year to find out exactly where their seating will be in any venue, let alone a seat number.
How can Locog sell the tickets, yet claim it hasn’t finalised the seating plans?. How can Locog take the money, yet maintain we should trust them in dividing the venue into broadly equal divisions of categories?
After the Sydney Olympic Games ticket ballot it emerged that the organisers had just 14 ‘A’ category seats for sale to the Australian public to a diving final.
So Locog, come clean. How many A, B, C and D category tickets are for sale in each of the velodrome final sessions, or the opening ceremony, or the swim finals?
It is not good enough to be told a vague meaningless statistic that there are more than a million ticket orders for the men’s 100m final.
I am more interested in understanding that I had a realistic chance of getting a seat, and that the ballot system wasn’t simply bait advertising.
Such information is not commercially sensitive. It is about respecting the consumer – the people that are handing over £500 million to buy the tickets – and being a transparent organisation.
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