London organisers investigating empty Olympic seats
Sunday, 29 July, 2012 01:02:26 PM
On a school holiday and after months of public complaints over the inability of thousands in Britain to buy tickets, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, the minister responsible for the Olympics, said he was disappointed by the empty seats and that the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games were looking into it.
"LOCOG are doing a full investigation into what happened," Hunt told the BBC one day after a widely praised opening ceremony starring Queen Elizabeth, Paul McCartney and Rowan Atkinson.
Television coverage of events on Saturday showed and visitors to venues found scores of empty seats in the early part of the day at the aquatics centre, in the basketball arena and later on at Wimbledon for the tennis. There was also plenty of space to stretch out in the Olympic Park.
Sports Minister Hugh Robertson said he was surprised that the events were not full.
LOCOG became used to putting up the "sold out" sign within minutes of each tranche of tickets going on sale to the public.
On Saturday some ticket box offices at venues in the park still had queues of people seeking to buy tickets for selected sports.
LOCOG said in a statement late on Saturday: "Where there are empty seats, we will look at who should have been sitting in the seats, and why they did not attend. Early indications are that the empty seats are in accredited seating areas, but this is day one, and our end of day review will provide a fuller picture," LOCOG declined to provide a figure for the number of people in the park on Saturday or how many tickets had been sold but said that 11 million people would attend the Games.
By early June, 7 million of the total 8.8 million Olympic tickets had been sold, and about half of the 2.45 million Paralympic tickets, in a process that began last year.
But the combination of a complex and opaque online ticketing system which appeared unable to cope with the huge demand and seemed skewed towards those prepared to bid for thousands of pounds worth of tickets, resulted in a wary public.
About a quarter of the 928,000 tickets made available in May failed to sell, including for popular sports such as beach volleyball and boxing.
In early June, LOCOG still had about 550,000 tickets to sell with just weeks to go.
A large chunk of them were so-called contingency tickets which had been held back while logistics such as TV camera positions were resolved.
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