Following the breakdown of the first-come, first-served online ticketing system last week due to enormous demand, the organizers of the Beijing Olympics 2008 have announced that the next batch of tickets will be sold via a lottery.

Residents of mainland China will be able to register for the lottery system from December 10 to 30 to buy the 1.8 million tickets, which will be assigned to them randomly. The exact date for the lottery has not been announced.

“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 organizers said.

A total of 1.85 million tickets went on sale on October 30 on a first-come-first-served basis through the ticketing website, a hotline and 1,000 designated bank branches.

However, the online booking system crashed within hours due to the huge number of requests.

“The Web site received 20 million hits in the first three hours of sale, the call centre received 3.8 million calls and lengthy queues formed at the 1,000 designated branches of the Bank of China,”writes the Guardian.

Because the crashed, only about 43,000 tickets were sold last week, according to Xinhuanet.

A total of 7 million tickets are available for the Games. The first batch of 1.6 million tickets were allocated by lottery earlier this year. People living outside China will get their chance to buy tickets starting April to August next year, which will be released on a first-come-first-served basis.

Related:

Entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 3:46 am under Uncategorized.

Read more entries by Ruben Francia.
Stumble It!