Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail • Hacker News Board

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#41

Post by JimmyL » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 12:13 AM UTC

micheljansen wrote: post #30

Jgrubb wrote: post #23

As a native Atlantan who was 18 during the 1996 games, I recall tickets being absolutely easy to get (many for below face value) pretty much anywhere you went in the Olympic village area. If you don't care which event you get into, the easiest hack is to just go down there and buy them in person.

The London 2012 Olympic tickets are not for resale. The terms and conditions for the tickets dictate that they cannot be resold and any tickets that are resold are considered invalid. Of course they cannot possibly check that for all tickets, but so far it seems to work because I haven't seen anyone trying to resell tickets.

There are also much stronger laws (and enforcement practices) around reselling sports tickets in the UK than in the US.

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#42

Post by wdr1 » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 3:46 AM UTC

ldd- wrote: post #38

wdr1 wrote: post #37

Former Ticketmaster Employee here. I was a director of engineering & very much involved in the ticketing of the 2008 Olympics. I ended up leaving shortly afterwards for Google. So while I don't have any firsthand knowledge of the 2012 games, I thought I could share some perspective. - The Olympic committees often have final say over design, but a lot of effort is invested. We all know the phrase of something looking…

When I was in Germany in 2006 during the World Cup, they had an online system in place to allow people to return their tickets. They would then periodically re-release those tix into the pool . . . it was through that reissue process that I secured all of my tix. Of course, the Olympics is a far more complex set of events, but I'd have to imagine it would have been easy to implement this year (6 years later).

I'm relatively certain people can already return Olympic tickets.

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#43

Post by micheljansen » Mon, Aug 06, 2012, 8:51 AM UTC

JimmyL wrote: post #41

micheljansen wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The London 2012 Olympic tickets are not for resale. The terms and conditions for the tickets dictate that they cannot be resold and any tickets that are resold are considered invalid. Of course they cannot possibly check that for all tickets, but so far it seems to work because I haven't seen anyone trying to resell tickets.

There are also much stronger laws (and enforcement practices) around reselling sports tickets in the UK than in the US.

Yep, reselling tickets is actually illegal and can land you in jail (or at least a hefty fine): http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-19109747

Re: Usability Hell: London 2012 Olympics Ticketing Fail

#44

Post by matthewowen » Tue, Aug 07, 2012, 9:37 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #32

matthewowen wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Fairly allocating a severely undersupplied stock of tickets without allowing the price mechanism to arbitrate is very hard.' This is part of ticketing. This is a challenge. So ticketing isn't easy.

Plenty of events, in fact the vast majority of them, don't suffer from this undersupply.

That's very true. But it's true for many fields that most of the difficulty/challenge/complexity comes from a relatively small proportion of the cases.