Vancouverite Andrea Burton cites pure luck for being one of the few people to buy 2010 Winter Olympics tickets Saturday amid the VANOC havoc.
“The Olympic gods were smiling on me,” said Burton, who ordered pairs of tickets to the men's hockey final, men's figure skating long program and closing ceremony.
Tickets.com CEO Larry Witherspoon apologized in a VANOC news release more than three hours after the ill-fated online and phone sale began. Embarrassed VANOC blamed "difficulties with the configuration between the virtual waiting room and the ticketing transaction site." Burton said she never saw a virtual waiting room.
“The website was brutal, it was really slow,” she said. “I was just clicking refresh and at one point I got to the log-in page. I did my log-in, the main page where you can buy tickets opened but not all of the icons came.”
VANOC will try again at 10 a.m. Nov. 14 to sell 100,000 tickets. Ticketing vice-president Caley Denton claimed a few hundred tickets were sold, mainly through the call centre. The public pool will be topped-up with tickets diverted from the Olympic family contingency.
