CHINA: New Beijing Olympic ticket chief looks to resolve sales chaos

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games ticketing department new chief Zhu Yan announces his plans for the second round of ticket sales following the dismissal of the previous head Rong Jun after the original sales plan collapsed in chaos. Zhu Yan was introduced as the new Director of the Beijing Olympic ticketing department on Friday (November 30) following the sacking of Rong Jun in the wake of chaos surrounding the second round of ticket sales for the 2008 Games. The sale of 1.85 million tickets on a first come, first served basis was abandoned after less than a day last month when overwhelming demand caused the ticketing system to collapse. Rong Jun admitted organisers had underestimated demand but his apology to the Chinese people earlier this month was clearly not sufficient to save his job. His successor Zhu Yan, who works for the city government as head of the "Digital Beijing" project told reporters that applicants would be restricted to eight tickets each, rather than the previous 50, when the second round of sales resumes under a lottery system on December 10. "After serious consideration, the committee has cancelled the rule that everyone can buy 50 tickets for 10 events, this ruling will enable more people to participate in the Olympics if they wish to do so. That is our wish," said Zhu. While the sale of Olympic tickets for profit is illegal, seats for the opening ceremony have been on sale via the Internet for up to 20,000-USD and Zhu used his introduction as an opportunity to send a message to those involved in the illegal sale of tickets. "The scalping of tickets is banned by China's laws and opposed to by the Olympics Committee. Relevant departments will punish those who scalp tickets," Zhu told reporters. Organisers suspended sales on October 30 after their Web site received 20 million hits in the first three hours. 8 million telephone calls were also registered and lengthy queues formed at the 1,000 designated branches of the Bank of China. As a result of the system crash, only 43,000 tickets were allocated. Zhu explained that when the second round of sales resumes under a lottery system on December 10, those who queued at the Bank of China branches will still have a 50-ticket quota along with priority for allocation of the remaining 1.8 million tickets before the lottery takes place. The first batch of 1.6 million tickets was also heavily oversubscribed and allocated by lottery earlier this year. Seven million tickets for the Beijing Games will be made available to the general public with nearly three quarters reserved for mainland China residents.

ITN Source | December 1, 2007

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