CoSport, the biggest overseas agency for Olympic tickets, has apologised after people were forced to queue for more than six hours to collect their allocations, but said it could do nothing to help some of those whose seats are scattered around stadiums.
Several hundred people joined long lines on Monday at a CoSport office in Paddington, in central London to collect tickets. Queues on Tuesday were still significant, with some buyers reporting wait times of around two hours.
In a statement CoSport, the official overseas ticketing partner for the United States, Australia and Canada, said it apologised to those forced to wait and could "understand their frustration".
Monday was the first day that tickets could be collected in London and the company had laid on more than twice the usual number of staff to help, it said. The statement added: "We understand that people want to collect their tickets as early as possible but in an email to customers sent out more than a week ago we encouraged them to avoid peak periods, particularly yesterday (Monday), where possible.
"Our processing times are always considerably faster once we've been up and running for one full day and our speedier delivery today reflects this. In response to the heat, we have set up overnight a covered walkway so customers are shaded against the sun. We are open to collect tickets right through until 12 August."
A number of ticket buyers have complained that their CoSport-purchased seats were distributed around venues, in some instances forcing parents to sit some distance from their children. The statement apologised for this, but warned that this could not always be remedied: "Within the allocation of tickets that we received, we strive to seat people together. Unfortunately this is not always possible and our terms and conditions explain this. When a problem is flagged to us, we will always review our entire allocation for that event and investigate if we can find a practical alternative."
Many of those lining up were customers from the US, Canada and Australia who had not been able to get their tickets by post. CoSport is also the official overseas resale partner for the Swedish, Austrian, Bulgarian and Norwegian Olympic committees, and hundreds of Britons bought tickets under EU rules that allow them to purchase from other European nations.
Nick Green, the head of the Australian Olympic team in London, described the process as "unacceptable" but said CoSport had given assurances all Australian purchasers would get their tickets in the end.
One woman told the Guardian that after a four-hour wait on Monday evening she was told that purchased tickets for the beach volleyball, diving and fencing appeared to have been lost entirely.
"It appeared that my tickets had been pulled and put into an envelope, but they'd misplaced that envelope," said Allison Nau, 29, who opted to pick up the tickets as she and her husband were in the process of moving from New York to London when they bought them.
A CoSport staff member "was rifling through stacks of papers that were sitting on top of boxes, and he came back and said, 'We've misplaced your envelope. We don't know where it is'", Nau said, describing the scene in the office as fraught and chaotic. She said: "There were high levels of stress and panic, and just chaos. People were running around looking for tickets, trying to put them together."
