At 1am on 27th April, after a two-hour extension due to high demand on the website, the first ballot for the 2012 Olympic tickets officially closed. However, it has been said all along, people applying for tickets last night stood as good a chance of winning tickets as people who applied on March 15th when the tickets first went on sale.
In total there are 8.8 million tickets available for the Olympic games and, when they go on sale in September, another 2 million for the Paralympics games. Around half of these will be given to Corporate and VIP guests of the event.
However, a great deal of people have tried to ensure themselves a ticket for what's is branded as The Greatest Show On Earth by applying for several events in the hope that they get tickets for one of them.
What if They Win Tickets to all the Events They Have Applied For?
Some people could be expecting to pay a bill of £200 for four tickets to the evening session in the athletics to watch the 200 meter final. However, if they also put down for the 100 meter final and the diving finals and the closing ceremony they could win tickets to all four events and end up paying a bill they can't afford.
Paul Deighton the London 2012 Chief Executive has always said "applicants should only ask for as many tickets as the can afford to buy, even though you are not guaranteed to receive any".
If you have stuck to the rules of “don't buy what you can't afford” surely then the Olympics becomes a rich man’s game only available to those with less financial commitments or worries. As said by financial expert Martin Lewis:
"This is an unprecedented UK event – we have absolutely no benchmark of expectation. Yet we’re expected to bid for tickets with no indication of what proportion we’ll get. This involves a financial and emotional commitment and is structured in a way that automatically penalises those with less cash."
When we are in a time of a recovering recession the chance of being billed large amounts hasn't really stopped people trying to hedge their bets on getting tickets. The Olympics have been publicised as the event everyone should want to attend and if you miss it your really going to be missing out.
So what will happen if you've got tickets you can't really afford? Between 10th May and 10th June 2011 the money will be taken from your account and you will be notified by June 24th if you have been successful in winning tickets. So, if you have bid for more tickets than you can afford for the short term there's not a great deal you're able to do. However, in the long term it's not as bad as you may think. There will be an opportunity next year to offer those tickets back to be put up for re-sale through the London 2012 website.
More details on the ticket resale program are to be released early in 2012.
