Industry News

Sports fans discover Commonwealth Games tickets fate

More than a million Australians are today set to find out if they have been lucky in securing Commonwealth Games tickets.

TEG-owned Ticketek’s enhanced platform handled 470 ticket requests every minute for Gold Coast 2018 during the final hours of the pre-sale period in May.

Today (Thursday), requests will be assigned at random, for 247 ticketed sessions, by a computer to a ballot of applicants.

According to the Brisbane Times newspaper, Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games Corporation (GOLDOC) chairman Peter Beattie AC said “hundreds of thousands” of people had been successful in securing tickets to the April 2018 event.

“We have been thrilled with the result of the ticket request phase, firstly the response from the general public and then the efficiency of the fair and equal draw in being able to process over one million ticket requests, which has been a major task,” Beattie said.

While a GOLDOC spokesman said he did not have confirmation on the exact number of successful tickets, Beattie said there will be some “disappointment” given the overwhelming number of requests compared to available tickets.

Organisers said a staggering 85,000 total requests were made during the final three hours ahead of the cut-off period.

In total, more than 1.2 million requests were made, meaning the Games is on course to hit its sales target. Ticketek recently said the overhaul of its application performance management (APM) tools allowed it to make a success of the launch of ticket sales for the Commonwealth Games.

“It’s important to remember a ticket request phase was chosen for the GC2018 ticketing program to ensure people had a fair chance of accessing tickets to what will be the biggest sporting event in Australia this decade,” he said.

Popular event requests included the Opening Ceremony, the rugby sevens final, cycling, diving, triathlon, swimming and the netball final, which was oversubscribed by five times, according to a statement released by GOLDOC.

Those who have missed out in the ticket request phase have been offered an exclusive pre-sale window from July 3, before the general sales period commences on July 5 for any remaining tickets.

The Commonwealth Games will be held from April 4-15 and will welcome 6,600 athletes and team officials from 70 nations and territories across the Commonwealth.

Image: Kgbo