Olympic Ticketing Chaos
The sale of Olympic tickets has been suspended less than 24 hours of Round Two of the booking process getting underway. The reasons, summarised by the China Daily, run as follows: "...the booking system crashed, phone lines jammed and serpentine queues formed at banks." In short, demand was high.
No doubt this is true. The problem is the utterly mendacious comments we heard yesterday as the booking system began to groan and creak: "We had tested the booking system several times, but the number of buyers are still out of our expectations," said Xu Chen, head of the Olympic affairs office at the Bank of China.
So to recap: the organisors didn't expect that, in a nation of 1.3 billion, where entreprenurialism is vritually a religion, that a very large number of people would try to snag as many tickets as they could at the earliest possible opportunity.
The stats are, apprently, these: 1.85 million tickets went 'on sale' at 9am, Beijing Time, on October 30, available over the phone, at banks at through the website. All systems were apparently linked to a central database. Apprently, during the peak early period, 200,000 orders were received every second; the web server was hit 8,000,000 times in the first hour alone (not sure those two stats quite add up as it would surely only take 40 seconds of ordering to generate the 8 million hits?). And the total number of tickets ACTUALLY sold: 9,000. Woohoo! Naturally the first China Daily report led with the '9,000 tickets sold' line, not the '7,991,000 people fail to order so much as a ground pass for preliminary fly-weight pidgeon shooting' angle.
My own experience of trying to order tickets was shambolic. I waited up til 1am, GMT, and began to hit the site using two separate computers. Mostly I got the 'page unavailable' line but occasionally I would make it through to a screen where I could pick the number of tickets I wanted and the price tier. The problem was, there was three more levels to the system before the database would even be consulted about whether these tickets were actually available. From there, for example, I had to make it to the page which showed my 'shopping basket' and from there I had to select at which bank I wished to pay. Finally, the database was searched for tickets that - of course - no longer existed.
I should say that in one hour of frenetic efforts to book ANY kind of ticket, I never once got past the shopping basket screen. Every time I made it to that (er...which was twice), any further button press would result in the 'page unavailable' line which meant I had to start all over again. It was only on the following day that I got to actually find out that the items I had somehow managed to place in my basket were sold out.
Am I the only one who suspects something a little fishy in all this? My own view is that it's highly likely the whole ticketing system is a sham, designed to create the impression of openess and transparency - thereby appeasing Olympic scrutineers - while simutaneously providing a means for tickets to remain in private hands where they can be sold for personal profit. What are the chances that when ticketing resumes after the five promised days, there will be ANY tickets left to any of the major events, certainly any in the cheaper tiers of the stadiums? Slim, I would say. The members of the Olympic Organising Committee will be able to claim that it played a fair game and offered the People a chance to secure seats. All the while, they would have hoarded all the best seats for themselves, plus their many friends, relations, mistresses and business partners.
I've talked to at least two friends in China who have said they have been offered tickets for any event they choose. Tickets are out there. They're just not for the likes of you and I, who may only be able to afford face-value (if that).
I should also say that I did attempt to make similar comments to the above on the China Daily's own 'Comments' section in response to the initial news story of 'unexpected' demand on October 30. Needless to say it never quite made it past the moderator.
