By Xinhua
Beijing : Only 450,000 tickets for the Beijing Olympic Games scheduled in August have been successfully allocated, accounting for about a quarter of the tickets available for sale in the second phase, the Games Organising Committee (BOCOG) said.
More than 700,000 orders for 4.2 million tickets were received by the BOCOG, but only 123,000 bookings were confirmed after a computerised random draw, the BOCOG said in a notice posted on its website Monday.
Though BOCOG did not cite any reason why about 75 percent of the tickets still remain unsold, it is believed that it resulted from the fact that some popular events were extremely over-subscribed while the rest events had much less bookings.
Rong Jun, deputy head of BOCOG’s ticketing centre, said earlier that the demand was “extremely high but too centralised on several hot events”.
A total of 1.8 million tickets, including 21,000 tickets for the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games and 26,000 tickets for the closing ceremony, were put on sale in December.
More than 1.5 million tickets were allocated in the first stage of sales last year.