Online sales for S. Korea Winter Games open amid North jitters
‘Greater Olympic buzz’
SEOUL, Sept 5, (AFP): Online ticket sales for next year’s Winter Olympics opened in South Korea Tuesday, with organisers admitting far fewer places had so far been sold than previously implied, and concerns growing over North Korea’s nuclear antics.
The 2018 Pyeongchang Games will take place in a country with a limited winter sports tradition and far from the core markets of Europe and North America — making local attendance crucial to ensuring the grandstands are full.
But in the first phase of South Korean sales earlier this year, organisers allocated 162,000 tickets in an application lottery — just over a quarter of their 600,000 target.
Worse still, they admitted Tuesday that only 52,000 of those tickets had actually been sold.
“It’s true that the first-phase sale was rather disappointing,” said Song Hun-Seok, media service chief at the Pyeongchang Organizing Committee (POCOG).
At the time the country was reeling over the sprawling corruption scandal that saw president Park Geun-Hye
Lindberg
impeached.
“We will make efforts to create a greater Olympic buzz with various build-up events” including performances and street campaigns, said Song.
There are 1.18 million seats available for the two-week event next February.
Of those, 70 percent have been alloted to South Korean residents, with 30 percent going to overseas fans and sponsors through separate processes.
In all, POCOG said, 229,000 spots had been sold up to July 17, the latest figures available, including 177,000 to overseas fans.
That amounts to less than 20 percent of the total, with little more than five months to the opening ceremony.
Popular events such as ice hockey and figure skating have sold well, but there is lack of enthusiasm for snow events, where South Korea is weak.
Gunilla Lindberg, head of the IOC’s Coordination Commission, said last week that she was “very pleased” with the progress of preparations, but that more buzz needed to be created to drive ticket sales and there were questions over some of the venues’ postOlympics use.