Most of the 80,000 “golden tickets” to the Olympics will sell out in an hour when they go back on sale tomorrow morning, Games organisers believe.
Tomorrow’s sale, starting at 11am, is exclusive to 20,000 people who missed out twice in last year’s public sale, and are entitled to a maximum four tickets each.
The so-called “lucky losers” - victims of a computer glitch - will have the pick of prime seats, including 5,000 for the 100m final and high-demand seats for the opening and closing ceremonies.
Ticketmaster, whose website has proved unreliable, will introduce a “load management” system for this third phase to stop the site crashing under weight of demand.
Customers will be confronted with a “holding queue” message at the busiest times.
Once they are beyond this, they can still expect to wait for 20 minutes - longer in some cases - between choosing their seats and for their purchase to be complete. “When you have sustained demand and reduced availability it could take even longer” said Chris Edmonds, managing director of Ticketmaster.
He expects the website will sell 100,000 tickets per hour - meaning most of these prime seats will be gone by lunchtime tomorrow.
Locog are putting 928,000 seats up for sale and these - minus what is taken by the “lucky losers” - will be up for grabs in a five-day sale starting on Sunday.
Around 1.2 million people - those who were left empty handed from last year’s ballot - will be eligible for the sale. In the latest of a series of glitches, the sale of Olympic football tickets ran into trouble last week.
A small number of buyers were confronted with an error message in the early hours of the sale.
But Ticketmaster insist the issue has been resolved by its technical experts and will not recur for the third phase.
