Organisers of the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics are aiming to sell more than 90 per cent of the 1.07 million available tickets prior to the start of the event.
Christophe Dubi, International Olympic Committee (IOC) executive director for the Olympic Games, revealed his drive to boost ticket sales to nine out of 10 before the February 9 Opening Ceremony.
Currently, a total of 55 per cent of tickets have been shifted for the games in South Korea, with only 65 days to go until the event kicks off, low numbers are one of the biggest concerns for organisers.
Last month, a jump in ticket sales has been attributed by the Local Organising Committee to the opening of the new route of the KTX high-speed train between Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province and Gangneung, which is close to the Olympic venue.
The Winter Paralympic Games’ organisers also opened dedicated ticket counters across the host nation in an effort to boost the sales numbers. In addition, due to worries over poor international ticket sales pushed the South Korean government to allow visa-free travel to tourists from Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Dubi states that there has been a sense of growing optimism around ticket sales with an average of 1,200 passes sold each day.
“We are feeling very confident,” Dubi said. “I always said we have to trust the Koreans and that there would be a late surge of tickets.”
In the last week of October, it was reported that just 457 tickets had been sold for the Paralympics, according to a document provided by the Department for Culture, Sports and Tourism.
PyeongChang organisers denied the lowly figure, although they admitted only 9,401 – about 4.3 per cent – had been shifted. That last update revealed that only five per cent of the 223,353 tickets had been sold.
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