The mess that is the Olympic ticket site

It was bad enough that last year the Olympic 2012 tickets farce made you pick from absolutely everything, then keep hundreds of pounds sitting around in your account waiting to be taken, just to then give most people no tickets and some people all of the tickets. Now that they have seemingly opened up ticket sales to anyone, you’d expect it to be better. But it’s not. It’s shit, and this is why (with screenshots).

Search

First you have to search, which shows you what is ‘available’, and lists all the price categories. That it is not everything implies a filter.

All of the categories!

Oh man, that’s lucky! There’s tickets in all categories for the Opening Ceremony. People must have decided they can’t stand all that blustering and returned them, but I’d watch it for twenty quid.

Revealing the first lie

Huh, would you look at that. The search page was lying. The cheapest tickets they have are a grand. If only I was a merchant banker, I could use my tax-payer bonus to pay for these…

Affordable

Let’s try some others. That’s a bit of luck, I managed to brute force my way through the search and eventually find a ticket within my  99-percenter salary.

Encouraging

And the ticket chooser even indicates that there are 4 tickets available. I have friends, so lets try getting them all.

Almost there

Brilliant. In the (shopping) bag! Let’s use my Olympic sanctioned Visa card to pay for these.

The revelation

What’s that? I thought I already searched? What the fuck was that first screen? You know, the one that let me search for available tickets?

The grand fuck you

WHAT. THE. FUCK? Are you serious? Are you actually serious? In what world would you make me go through that many screens and clicks, all the while implying that you have stock of an item you are trying to sell, only to tell me at the very last stage that it is not available?

This is the last straw Seb Coe. I have had enough of your games. You can shove your Olympic ticketing website up your arse.