Got unwanted Olympic tickets? Want to have another go at buying some? Well the official Olympic ticket resale programme launched today. The question is; do you know how the process works? Our survey says ‘no’.
It’s 2012. The year of the London Olympic Games. Are you excited?
I’m not, as I don’t have any tickets (despite living a couple of tube stops from the Olympic village). Anyway, there’s good reason to put my bitterness aside – I may have a chance to buy someone else’s rejected tickets.
Confusion over Olympic reselling
If you were awarded a whole bunch of tickets for events you weren’t hugely interested in, or you’ve now decided to escape the country, you can resell them from today.
How? Through the official Olympic website, and only through this site. Ebay, or any other method of reselling, is strictly off-limits – otherwise say hello to a maximum fine of £20,000.
The official reselling programme will be open on the Olympic website until 3 February, so the race is on. But do you know how the whole process will work?
Worryingly, our survey of 1,250 Brits found that most don’t. Only 16% of those asked understood (fully or mostly) how the Olympic ticket resale will work. And of those who said they were likely to buy or sell tickets in this round, an understanding of the process was higher, but it was still a pretty lowly 34%.
Olympic site isn’t very clear
From a cursory read of the resale information page on the Olympic site, I’m not surprised people are scratching their heads over how it works. On a simple level it will go something like this: you’ll tick the tickets you want to put up for sale from your online account, and wait for someone to buy them. Simple, right?
Not quite. I’ve already picked out a contradiction on this page. When you put your tickets up for resale the site makes it clear that this ‘does not guarantee that any or all of the tickets you submit for resale will be resold’. However, it then goes on to state that ‘once you have submitted your selection of tickets for resale, your tickets will become void’.
If I’m reading this right, as soon as you put your tickets up for resale those tickets will then be void. That’s even before the tickets have been successfully re-bought, which as was said before, isn’t guaranteed.
The word ‘void’ certainly sounds final, so what happens to that unsold ticket? Apparently it will be ‘un-voided’, but the wording on the site certainly doesn’t make this clear.
So, I have two questions for you – are you going to try to buy or sell Olympic tickets? And if you are, have you got the foggiest about how the reselling process works? We’ll be busy testing the site tomorrow, selling and buying, so we’ll let you know how we get on.
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