Paralympic ticket system same as Olympics
Tickets for the Paralympics will go on sale using the same system as the Olympics. London 2012 bosses say a ballot is the fairest way to allocate tickets.
Applications for Paralympic tickets open for three weeks from 9 September to 26 September, with prices starting at £10 for adults and £5 for anyone who is 16 or under and over 60.
Around 4,200 athletes will compete in 20 Paralympic sports.
London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton said lessons have been learned from the huge disappointment of the oversubscribed Olympic ticket sale but the tried-and-tested application system is the fairest way to share out more than 1.5 million Paralympic tickets.
He added: “We have got no doubt at all. I think that all the disappointment with Olympic tickets was totally a function of the huge demand relative to the application availability and so many people did not get a ticket.
“I think that everybody accepts that the ballot was a fair way to do it. A first-come first-served system would not be able to support the amount of demand that it had.”
The crowd, the interest and the enthusiasm spread around the country will be quite something. London 2012 chief executive Paul Deighton
Oversubscribed Paralympic events will be decided by a ballot. Successful buyers will only be informed after all applications are processed and payment has been taken.
A second phase of Paralympic tickets will go on sale “probably pretty shortly after that”, according to Mr Deighton.
Almost two thirds of the 1.9 million people who applied in the six-week first round of Olympic sales ended up empty-handed. A total of 1.2 million people ended up with nothing, with only 700,000 – 36 per cent – being successful.
Click here to see the Paralympic daily competition schedule
Paralympic opening and closing ceremony tickets start at £20.12, with the top-end price at £500 for the opening ceremony and 75 per cent of tickets costing £20 or under. There will also be day passes, acting like “a taster menu”, to see a range of different sports in the Olympic Park or at the ExCeL in a day.
With the cheap tickets, past British Paralympic success and regional support for hometown athletes who are going for gold, Mr Deighton is predicting “the crowd, the interest and the enthusiasm spread around the country will be quite something”.
He said: “For those people who have been through the system before it will be a very similar process.
“The practical difference here compared to the Olympic sales is that because the tickets are quite a bit cheaper the amount that you are going to leave on your cash card will be less and for shorter.”
