Olympic Phase 2 Tickets - Good Luck
Phase 2 of Olympic Ticket sales in Beijing started today, and it’s not exactly going smoothly. I didn’t expect much from a first-come-first-serve national offering with 130 million+ Internet users hammering one web site, so I can’t say I was surprised. Here’s a tally of how it went.
There are three methods of trying to get tickets, from the BOCOG Web site:
The tickets will be sold through the following three channels: the Beijing Olympic Official Ticketing website; 1,000 BOCOG-designated Bank of China (BOC) branches; and the Beijing Olympic Ticketing Call Center, +8610 952008.
Web site: It was completely jammed up, and took many attempts to even log in. A friend said that after a while he was able to see the event page, and he thinks he might have got an order in, but cannot tell. I never got passed logging in and browsing events, and even that took 30 minutes. Lots of timeouts and resets.
Phone number: One friend called and said it registered a wrong number. I tried at 11 am and it gave the standard busy message in China, “Sorry the subscriber you called is busy now. Please try again later.” So much for any kind of modern call queueing.
Bank of China (BOC) branch sales: This was our method of last resort — show up in person in hopes they have the most reliable way of getting tickets. Well, around 10:45am at the Bank of China branch in FullLink Plaza in Chaoyang, they said they were only able to sell tickets to one person the entire morning. Why? Because their point of purchase terminal is exactly what the rest of us use — the Web site. So even though they had a line of customers in the morning to buy tickets, and there were still folks strolling in with cash and Visa cards to try and buy, they only sold 10 tickets the entire time. They had the same Web site woes as everyone else. They told us the best thing to do is just keep hammering the Web site to get in.
So there’s Phase 2 in a nutshell for you. Looks like the best bet is a ticket scalper.
October 31st, 2007 03:53
Interesting stuff. I am working in the airline industry (using IBM’s TPF (Transaction Processing Facicily)). We typically see thousans of transactions per second (7×24x365). This is labeled ‘legacy’… but it works.
Cees.
May 12th, 2008 17:06
Wow. Doesn’t sound like such a well thought out plan, huh? They’ll get it all worked out, but it’s funny that they thought 1 website and one phone number (that was wrong) would handle that much demand.
Mike Smith
August 8th, 2008 13:29
I have 2 tickets more to olimpic games beijing 2008
1 ticket to volleyball final - 24/08 ( VO 41 - Cat C; 10:00)
1 ticket to Athletics - 20/08 (AT 11 - Cat C; 19:00)
If you are intersting contact my e-mail (oliveiramarques04@gmail.com)
I delivery the tickets in beijing