Olympics Tickets: Summer 2008 Tickets on Sale

Interesting what you find when you google "olympics tickets".






Now that its eight months away the heat is turning up in the quest to purchase Summer Games tickets. According to my search, there seem to be at least two "official" websites claiming the title of "official ticketing website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic games.




CoSport states they are an "official ticket agent, authorized to sell tickets for the Beijing 2008 Olympics Games to residents in the EU/European Economic area." They ask that visitors read the terms and conditions for more information and applicable countries.




CoSports offers Olympic Event tickets and Olympic Hospitality Packages and Accomodations for both the summer games and the Vancouver Winter games. According to their countdown, as of today there are 223 days until Beijing.





From what I can tell from the official website which actually seems to be the real deal in China (and according to the BBC attracts 1 million hits PER DAY), if you've established residence in the People's Republic of China and you have a valid ID with a few exceptions you are eligible to order tickets for the Summer Games and the Paralympic Games from their site and through the Bank of China ticket outlets which are the premiere ticketing venues of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games (for china residents).





BBC news reports that there are some 7 million summer games tickets on sale with about 75% going to chinese residents. Wow and get this...some tickets are priced as low as $1 for students in an effort to keep prices affordable for everyone.





Another rule I find interesting that has been reported is that there will be no block or group sales of tickets to the opening ceremonies so one person, one ticket apparently no exceptions. We'll see if that's going to be a hard and fast rule.








China Daily.com reports that sales for ticket buyers outside of China will be processed through each country's National Olympic committee and mind you for the rest of the world that is 25% of 7 million. I'm still trying to figure out if thats generous or not.





Then you have the ticket vendors with the funny eyecatching names who offer all sorts of variations of seats and schedules etc. Of course there's ticketfinder.com, goldentickets.com, cheappremiumtickets.com, onpointsports.com. If its listed here its ONLY becasue I find the name interesting. The only one I visited was ticketfinder.com just to see what the site looked like. They sell volleyball and Olympic beach volleyball tickets by the day starting on August 8 all the way to the finals.





I was wondering with such a huge operation how the organizers could control internet sales of summer games tickets. Apparently they are trying to control what they can but they can't always catch everything because this month a couple of weeks ago the BBC website reports on websites that are being set up as fake Olympic ticket sellers to trick people.






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