Ticket sales 'blow away' SLOC

Winter Games organizers certainly had high expectations for their online ticket sales program. But nothing can compare to the flood of tickets buyers who swamped the Salt lake Organizing Committee Web site Tuesday.

"The $23 million in tickets sold at the end of the first day is way above our ticketing expectations," SLOC President Mitt Romney said. "It blows away our expectations."

Romney said SLOC expected to sell about $8.1 million in tickets the first day, and the $23 million is quite possibly an Olympic record.

"We don't kid ourselves about why this is happening. The Games are coming home to the largest market in the world and the Olympic athletes are an incredible draw," Romney said.

The largest percentage of ticket sales came from Utah, which logged 37 percent of the total sold. Games organizers are counting on Utahns to purchase the majority of tickets. The next states in order of tickets sold were California, Colorado, Illinois and Arizona.

Also a good harbinger for ticket sales, some 38 percent of tickets were sold as part of a package of tickets that lumped high-demand tickets to events in lesser demand.

"The Olympic Experience Package idea seems to be working," Romney said.

In all, about 50,000 people accessed the SLOC ticketing Web site, and 11,378 completed their orders for 208,404 tickets. The top tickets sold were for figure skating, alpine skiing, hockey and opening and closing ceremonies.

Romney said the record sales were possible only because of Tickets.com, the online entity that provided the technology to handle ticket orders on 2,400 different access ports.

"The capacity and experience of Tickets.com are what made this record volume possible. Without them we could never have processed this avalanche of orders. Clearly, we're very encouraged by this response, but one inning does not make a baseball game," he said.

Added W. Thomas Gimple, CEO of Tickets.com, "Through this close partnership with SLOC, we've been able to use technology to fundamentally improve the experience and offer consumers everywhere a fair, equitable and convenient way to purchase some of the most coveted tickets in the world."

In addition to the tickets sold via the Internet, customers ordered 1,895 ticket catalogs to order tickets by mail.

The first round of ticket sales will continue through Dec. 12. Orders can be placed on the SLOC Web site at www.saltlake2002.com, or by ordering a catalog of events and packages at 1-800-TICKETS (1-800-842-5387).

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E-mail: spang@desnews.com