China:Organisers of next year's Olympic Games have decided to revert to a lottery system to allocate tickets after the computerised booking system buckled under the weight of overwhelming phone, online and retail outlet orders for the second batch of tickets.
Olympic fever continues to grow at a furious pace in the Chinese capital and when the second tranche of 1.85 million tickets went on sale on a first-come, first-served basis on Tuesday last week, there was pandemonium.
The ticket website received 20 million hits in the first three hours of sale, the call centre had 3.8 million calls and long queues formed at the 1,001 designated branches of the Bank of China.
There are just over seven million tickets for sale for the games, which open at 8.08pm on August 8th, 2008 and run until August 24th. Three-quarters of those have been set aside for buyers in China. The first batch of 1.6 million tickets was allocated by lottery earlier this year.
Residents of mainland China will be able to register to buy the second tranche of tickets from December 10th-30th, the Beijing organisers said.
"The ticketing policy modifications aim to reflect a people-oriented policy and to adhere to principles of fairness, impartiality and convenience to the public," the statement ran.
Only 43,000 tickets were allocated last week and organisers conceded they may have underestimated demand for the second batch and were forced to suspend sales when the system crashed.
The organisers promised they had made policy adjustments after taking into consideration "technical verification and research by specialists as well as comments and suggestions from various parties". Many had queued for hours outside Bank of China branches where the tickets were on sale and there were mutterings of discontent over the way the ticketing has been handled. Some blamed a foreign ticketing system.
Rong Jun, who is the organiser responsible for ticketing, admitted the demand was more than expected but denied there had been a collapse. He told Chinese TV: "It is a bit slow but still running. So we are calling for patience from ticket buyers."
There was criticism about the first round of ticketing between April and June, which was done by computerised lottery but without any transparency about how the 1.6 million tickets were issued, including 26,000 to the highly sought-after opening and closing ceremonies.