London 2012 tickets - why didn't they say how many tickets there would be at each price?

London 2012's director responsible for tickets, Chris Townsend, is reported by BBC as having failed to address the issue of why people were not told in advance how many tickets were available in each price band for each session.


In the absence of any denial, there are two possible explanations.


Perhaps the ticketing sale operation people we inept. They certainly managed a balloting system which demonstrates a real contempt for customer choice (see my previous item on this). So perhaps they just didn't think to bother telling people how many tickets were available at each price.


But it makes much more sense to me that they didn't tell people because they didn't know.


Take the simple example of a theatre with 10 rows of seats and two prices: £10 and £15. We wouldn't get too upset if for a production expected to sell really well, they offered 4 rows at £10 and 6 rows at £15 while for a lesser production or a less popular night, there might be 7 rows at £10 and 3 rows at £15. But we would expect the theatre to commit up-front as to which price applied to which row.


A canny theatre manager might want to keep their options open and not sell tickets for rows F G and H to begin with. When they knew how demand was going, they could decide the price for each of those rows to maximise their revenue. But something about our expectations of "fair play" might have customers get upset about this.


But for the Olympics, managing ticket demand so that customers declared their intentions up-front would have allowed them to be like the clever theatre manager, but without the grief.


The imperative to maximise Olympics ticket revenue would suggest that they didn't want to decide which block of seats was at which price until they knew how many people were willing to buy at each price point. If you have 10,000 seats and there is demand for 3,000 at the top price, 5,000 at the middle price and 15,000 at the bottom price, then you simply offer 2,999 at top price, 4,999 at middle price and 2,002 tickets at the bottom price. That way you can report that you "had to" conduct a ballot for tickets at each price point - but you maximise your revenue. Perhaps political considerations limit quite how far you can push this, but it would make a big difference to your income.


So, if my guess is right, London 2012 simply didn't know how many tickets there were going to be at each price. It all depended on how many people were willing to pay the higher prices.