A couple of thousand Finns planning to travel to Beijing to follow Olympics

Request for more tickets sent to Chinese organisers

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The Chinese are not the only people interested in next summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing. At least the Finns are equally keen on experiencing the Olympic fever on the spot.
     
In China the second phase of the selling of tickets to various Olympic events had to be interrupted soon after it had started. The keenness of the buyers simply crashed the organisers’ computer systems.
      Also in Finland the tickets were practically snatched away from the dealers’ hands, explains sales manager Juha-Pekka Kärkkäinen from the Suomen Matkatoimisto travel agency, the country’s official and only dealer of tickets to the Olympic Games.
      Each country was assigned a quota to the Beijing games. Finland received an allotment of fewer than 10,000 tickets to sell.
      "We applied for more than ten thousand tickets last spring. We were slightly disappointed with the surprisingly low number of tickets allocated to us", Kärkkäinen says.
     
The first batch of "several thousand tickets" has practically been sold already. Suomen Matkatoimisto has issued a request for further tickets from the organisers.
      "The demand is high. We expect the organisers’ response to our request in November. We continue to accept reservations from customers", Kärkkäinen says.
      According to Kärkkäinen there was already a lot of interest towards the 2004 Games in Athens, but "Beijing seems to interest people even more. People’s eagerness to travel to China looks to be immense."
      Kärkkäinen believes that at least two thousand Finnish Olympic tourists will add to the multitude of visitors to the Beijing Games.
     
"More than a thousand Finns will travel there through us. Hundreds more will arrange their visit through other means."
      The affordable price of tickets is one reason why people are so interested in the games. In China the price of a student ticket to an Olympic event can be less than a euro.
     
When the ticket sales commenced in China on Tuesday morning, more than eight million people visited the Internet site in question within the first hour. The pressure from the online buyers, combined with that of telephone buyers and traditional ticket outlet buyers, was too much for the system to handle and it soon crashed.
      The organisers have now announced that the next attempt to sell tickets will take place next week.
      In all, there are seven million tickets to be sold to various Olympic events.
      The Games take place in Beijing between the 8th and 24th of August 2008.


Links:
  The Official Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

Helsingin Sanomat