Xinhua reports that only 450,000 tickets for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games have been successfully allocated – one quarter of the tickets that were available in the second phase of ticket sales BOCOG said Sunday.
More than 700,000 ticket orders for the 4.2 million tickets were received, but only 123,000 bookings were confirmed after a computerized random draw.
Xinhua suggested Chinese fans’ selective enthusiasm was to blame. “it is believed that it resulted from the fact that some popular events were extremely over-subscribed while the rest of the events had much fewer bookings”.
Rong Jun, deputy head of BOCOG’s ticketing centre, said earlier that the demand was “extremely high but too centralized on several hot events”.
