The opening hours of ticket sales for the Cricket World Cup to be played in South Africa from February next year turned out to be a nightmare for the organisers.
The entire ticketing system crashed and by 10am, an hour after the tickets were made available to the public, just 12 transactions had been made worldwide.
Queues at Wanderers, where the final is to be played, went all the way up Corlett Drive as far as Rudd road but inside the stadium staff were twiddling their thumbs as they waited for matters to be corrected.
”The whole ticketing system went down,” said a source from the stadium. ”The call centre didn’t work and the website didn’t work.”
By 11am, the system was up and running but the people were trickling through the gates at the Wanderers.
At that stage about 50 people were standing in the actual ticketing queues while only 106 had filled out their request forms and been given numbers.
”The whole operation is taking longer than we expected. We were told it would take six minutes to process each transaction and with 14 ticketing offices at the Wanderers, 140 transactions could be dealt with in an hour. However, this is not happening,” said the source.
Some people have been camping out since Friday morning in their quest for tickets. – Sapa