Beijing has tickets glut after sales mismatch

BEIJING (Reuters) - Beijing Olympic Games organizers allocated just one-quarter of 1.8 million tickets available in the latest lottery sale of seats, officials said on Sunday, creating a new ticketing headache for the event.

The Beijing Organising Committee for the Games (BOCOG) said on its Web site (www.beijing2008.cn) that in its latest sale it received applications for 4.2 million tickets for the Games, which open on August 8, and for the opening ceremony of the following Paralympics.

However, only 123,000 applicants won in the lottery, receiving bookings for 450,000 tickets. That left three-quarters of available tickets in this second round of allocations still to be sold.

A previous round allocated 1.6 million tickets of the total seven million available for the Games.

Games organizers did not explain the mismatch between abundant applications and a glut of unsold seats but the official Xinhua news agency suggested Chinese fans' selective enthusiasm was to blame.

"It is believed that it resulted from the fact that some popular events were extremely over-subscribed while the rest of the events had much fewer bookings," Xinhua said.

Earlier, an official in BOCOG's ticket centre said demand had been "extremely high but too centralized on several hot events", Xinhua reported.

Selling tickets for such a huge, complex event has been a headache for past Olympics Games but Beijing has now had more than one foul-up.

The then director of the Beijing Olympic ticketing department was demoted in November following chaos in an earlier sales effort for this tranche of tickets.

Sales of 1.85 million tickets on a first come, first served basis in October were abandoned after less than a day when overwhelming demand caused the ticketing system to collapse.

(Reporting by Chris Buckley, Editing by Clare Fallon)