[kevinprince]

Ticketing is just plain hard and anyone who disagrees is just wrong.

The site is getting a few hundred thousands users a day right now trying to ger a few thousand tickets mostly between 7pm and 10pm.

While I agree LOGOC could of got a lot of the copy and menus better, trying to display "real-time" availability and keeping ticket sales fair is very very hard and Ticketmaster are doing a fairly decent job.

[mseebach]

No, ticketing is fairly easy.

Fairly allocating a severely undersupplied stock of tickets without allowing the price mechanism to arbitrate is very hard.

Thinking it's a technology problem, when it's an economics problem, doesn't make it any easier.

[matthewowen]

'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.

[mseebach]

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

[matthewowen]

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.

[davewasthere]

Having built a few highly trafficked sites (in Airline, Education and Events Ticketing) I think that ticketing is actually pretty easy. Making something that is usable & simple is still hard work. But the actual processes behind tickets is fairly straightforward.

I've built a system for the planning and seating of VIP hospitality packages that has been used for Beijing & London as well as the last Rugby World cup. Admittedly my ticket app is only for a select group of clients & users, so I haven't needed to scale anywhere near to the same degree as LOCOG, but I have done so with other sites in the past and the scaling techniques are the same.

That said, with the benefit of hindsight, I think the ideal way to have done ticket resale, would have been for people to register interest in events, possibly taking payment information in advance. Any inventory released back to LOCOG could have then been randomly offered to people who'd registered interest. There would be some element of first-in first served, but you're always going to get that with oversubscribed events.

[FuzzyDunlop]

Of course, in the UK we don't have much choice other than Ticketmaster and SeeTickets. While there are alternatives for the smaller events, I think there's a chance the whole system could be disrupted.

The problem would be a lot easier to solve if you change the culture of releasing all your tickets at 9am, inviting hundreds of thousands of people to hammer your site all at once, at that specific time.

[bohrsatom]

I think moving away from first come first served would also help, and the London 2012 ticketing process did give this a reasonable shot (although it could be argued with limited success, IMO because they didn't allocate enough seats in this fashion). It would be more straightforward for concert tickets where there are only 1 or 2 price bands for a small number of shows.

Something that was very successful but is rarely mentioned was the ticket resale process. Most people I know who returned tickets this way got their money back and it appears to have done a good job of reducing the size of the secondary ticket market.

[pmarsh]

While ticketing is harder than people think, have you ever dealt with Ticketmaster's technologies?

Not fun can be an understatement.