Another Chance at Olympics Tickets!

If you thought you'd missed your chance to sit rink-side for men's gold medal hockey or take in an opening or closing ceremony at the 2010 Winter Olympics Games, there's good news: another 150,000 tickets will be up for grabs on Tuesday, June 6 at 10 am. About 140,000 of those will be for various Olympic sporting events, with the remainder for Opening, Closing and nightly Victory Ceremonies. This time, the Vancouver Organizing Committee will use a "virtual waiting room” and randomly select customer numbers, rather than a lottery or first-come, first-served system. 

VANOC sold $95 million worth of Canadian Olympics tickets last October, after receiving more than $345 million in requests. The committee used a lottery process: people signed into the site, requested which events they wanted to attend, and waited to see if they received any tickets. The process resulted in 120 of 170 events going to the lottery. When the VANOC online sales channel reopened in December, the remaining tickets of the first batch were sold within the first day.

Buyers will be limited to a maximum of four separate events, and between four and eight tickets per event. People who access the site will be held in the "virtual waiting room" and be randomly selected to move to the ticket selection page.

Caley Denton, VANOC's vice president of ticketing and consumer marketing, is advising people to sign on before Saturday to create an account, ensure that their login and password are correct, and that their Visa card is up to date. Visa, a corporate sponsor of the Olympic Games, is the only type of plastic accepted, although those without a card can pay with a post-dated cheque.

To sign up to buy tickets or find more information about Tuesday's sales, visit Vancouver2010.com. Or, you can find an assortment of tickets through our affiliates here.