Late flurry to snap up event seats

A QUARTER of last-minute Commonwealth Games tickets have been sold just days out from the Gold Coast’s largest event for decades.

On Saturday, Games CEO Mark Peters said just 150,000 tickets were left to purchase, with more than 100,000 of them understood to be in the preliminary heats of track and field, basketball, squash and table tennis.

Mr Peters said it was a fantastic result for a regional city, rivalling the 1.3 million tickets sold in Melbourne and the 1.2 million recorded in Glasgow during their respective Commonwealth Games events.

“Across 18 sports, that’s pretty good,” he said, adding he believed 95 per cent of tickets would be sold.

“We had 1.2 million tickets to actually sell out into the community, for a regional city (it’s) a bit of challenge, but at the end of our first out to market, we’d sold over a million ... an outstanding achievement.”