The Olympic Games don’t come to one’s country that often, so I leaped at the chance to buy tickets for it. From the start, the process annoyed the hell out of me – I could only use a Visa card, I must choose what tickets I wanted before the end of April with no guarantee of getting any of them, as oversubscribed events will go to a ballot, basically forcing me to go for more tickets than I actually wanted to improve my chances. And of course, I must pay for it over a year in advance. Or no tickets. Still, I sucked it up (it is the fucking Olympic Games after all), but the latest news has really pissed me off:
Applicants were originally told to make sure they had enough money in their accounts from 10 May to 10 June. But London 2012 says people will not be billed until next Monday at the earliest while they carry out ballots for oversubscribed events. About 1.8 million people applied for 20 million tickets, yet only 6.6 million tickets are available.
Applicants have already been advised they will not be told which tickets they have until the money has been collected. The latest date to hear is 24 June.
In other words, that massive hole in your bank balance you discovered could mean you won that awesome ticket to the 100m men’s final…or got several dozen tickets to see shooting and archery.
So to sum up: first they set up a really awful process where people feel they have to buy a shedload of tickets to stand a chance of seeing the Games, and now they will have a secret ballot to allot tickets, the results of which we will not know until we check our bank balances, and even THEN we won’t know what the hell we’ve been given. It really is outrageous that the organisers are going to charge us without giving us the bill first. The organisers have had this whole ticketing process ass backwards from the start, and it’s only gotten worse.
All I can say is, I hope to God the Olympics themselves are run better than this.
View Across The Pond 