VANOC Postpones Final Ticket Sale Due To Technical Issues

VANOC Postpones Final Phase Of Ticket Sales After Technical Issues Shut Down Online Sales

VANOC officials postponed the final phase of ticket sales for the Vancouver Games one week until next Saturday after "technical issues shut down online sales and caused telephone sales calls to stack up," according to Katie Mercer of the Vancouver PROVINCE. Long waits "crashed web browsers, prompting error messages that the connection had been lost or could not be accessed." VANOC officials said that the problem "arose from a configuration change" with official ticket broker Tickets.com (Vancouver PROVINCE, 11/8). Tickets.com in a statement said that the "problem was with the link between the virtual waiting room and the ticketing transaction site." The problem was "patched up within hours of the start of the Saturday-morning sale," but VANOC VP/Ticketing Caley Denton said that by then there was "concern some buyers might have given up." Denton: "We really wanted to make sure we stuck to our fairness message. We wanted to make sure we gave (buyers) the time to plan again and be able to get that fair access, versus turning it on at a time when people weren't prepared." Denton "couldn't estimate how many would-be purchasers were affected by the technical glitch but noted several hundred lucky buyers were able to scoop up tickets through the call centre." Denton said that those sales "will stand," but that an "equivalent number of tickets for each event will be pulled from the Olympic Family contingency pool and added to the Nov. 14 public sale to ensure online buyers get their fair crack" (CTVOLYMPICS.ca, 11/7).

GETTING THE WORD OUT: VANOC VP/Communications Renee Smith-Valade said that VANOC "did use Twitter to get messages out that they were experiencing problems." Smith-Valade: "We put out as much information as we felt we could say at the time." In Vancouver, Derrick Penner noted VANOC's initial messages through Twitter "made reference to heavy traffic on the site and that technicians were working on resolving the problem, so users should 'hang in there'" (VANCOUVER SUN, 11/8).