London 2012 organisers have been forced to suspend their ticket resale process amid criticism from frustrated potential buyers.
The resale scheme for those with unwanted tickets for the Games launched on Friday but such was the deluge of would-be buyers that organisers were moved to defend the decision to make resold tickets available immediately.
The problems are the latest encountered by organisers in trying to deal with ticket demand. During earlier sales rounds, the system ground to a near halt due to the volume of applicants.
Earlier this week, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Locog) was forced to admit that 10,000 too many tickets had been sold for four synchronised swimming sessions, forcing it to contact purchasers and offer them alternatives from the final batch of tickets, which have yet to go on sale.
Those interested in tickets put up for sale by buyers who can no longer use them are required to keep checking the site to see which are available. With each handful of tickets attracting thousands of potential buyers, frustrated purchasers have taken to Twitter and other social media to complain that each item they clicked on was already sold out.
Organisers initially said the system was holding up, but that the software used by ticketing partner Ticketmaster took "a few minutes" to refresh once tickets had been sold.In the early afternoon, Locog decided to stop accepting new tickets for resale and later suspended the website altogether.
A range of tickets were available, including some highly priced tickets for the best events from people who may have overspent initially, but there have been loud complaints from those finding the system unwieldy and frustrating. Critics have asked why Locog did not first collect the tickets for resale and put them all on sale at once.
Before the decision to suspend the process, Locog's chief executive, Paul Deighton, said some frustration from prospective purchasers was inevitable given the huge demand and limited availability. Most of those with unwanted tickets were expected to pass them to family or friends.
"I don't expect there to be a massive uptake, but I do expect there to be some because people's circumstances change. It will require quite an intensive effort on behalf of potential purchasers because the demand will be significant. Every ticket that comes up, there'll be a lot of people looking to get hold of it," Deighton said.
"I think that is how these ticketing systems work. It's how people are used to buying tickets. We started off with the ballot and in this case, we think this is probably the best way to do it. As with any ticketing system, where the demand is huge there will be an impact at times on the customer experience. We'll do our best to manage it but when demand so outweighs supply, there's always going to be a bit of a challenge."
In all, 6.6m of the 8.8m 2012 tickets will be made available to the public. More than 4m were sold in earlier rounds of ticketing, with every sport except football sold out. The resale window remains open until 3 February. The final batch of 1.3m tickets across all sports will go on sale in April.
