ShowTimeTickets.com and affiliate TicketCity.com were offering tickets to the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2010 Vancouver, B.C. Olympic Winter Games this week, despite the fact the tickets had not yet been printed, according to CBCNews. The tickets were taken down from both sites by Saturday morning, Sept. 22.
ShowTimeTickets.com, based in Vancouver, advertised the tickets for between $1,815 and $2,440 a seat at BC Place on Feb. 12, 2010.
But according to Vancouver’s Olympic organizers, tickets for the Games aren’t yet available.
On the VANOC website, a posting said that “until the ticketing program has been launched, any individual or group … claiming to have access to Games tickets is making that claim falsely.”
A spokesman for VANOC said any sales would be unauthorized and such tickets may not be honoured.
“The reality is, none of the tickets have been allocated,” said Caley Denton, the committee’s vice-president of ticketing and consumer marketing.
“There are no tickets that have been given to anybody at this point and people always need to purchase from authorized sources.”
Later Friday morning, the ShowTimeTickets.com website was altered to suggest that potential buyers register their interest in tickets when they become available.
A ShowTimeTickets.com representative told the CBC that the advertised tickets were not being sold directly by ShowTimeTickets. The company said an affiliate from Austin, Texas — TicketCity.com — was selling the tickets on the ShowTimeTickets site.
