For the cricket-crazy population of India, the World Cup that takes place once in four years is a holy grail moment. This year, since Cricket World Cup 2023 is being hosted by India, the excitement has been at fever pitch as fans get an opportunity to see their stars in action at home venues. However, for thousands of fans the excitement soon turned to disappointment as tickets for all scheduled India matches were sold out within minutes of going on sale.
In turn, this resulted in an online outrage against BookMyShow, the World Cup's official ticketing partner. After thousands of frustrated fans failed to secure tickets for the India-Pakistan match after it went on sale Sunday, several took to social media to express their disappointment with the ticket booking platform.
Many users who logged into the ticket booking app before the tickets for India-Pakistan match went live at 8 pm, reported that the application added them to a 'queue' zone for hours even as the tickets were sold out within minutes. Some rued that the application was not transparent enough to show the number of tickets available at a given point before it was all sold out.
Despite trying to book tickets from multiple devices simultaneously, some app users could not book a single ticket either.
At present, the BookMyShow app shows that tickets for all matches in the World Cup featuring India are sold out. At the same time, tickets for the sold-out games appear to be available for sale in online black-market forums for three to four times the original price.
While some frustrated fans suspect some foul play in the way tickets became unavailable within minutes, others point out that it was a simple mismatch between supply and demand. Even the Narendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad, which is scheduled to host five world cup matches, has a maximum capacity of 132,000 whereas evidently hundreds of thousands of Indian fans were queueing up on the BookMyShow app.
The World Cup’s official ticketing partner provided a standard response to disgruntled fans on social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. It said, “The demand for World Cup tickets is much higher than the limited supply available. With such a huge number of users booking their tickets, they are bound to sell out quickly.”
However, some fans did not respond kindly to this response and hashtags calling for boycott of BookMyShow are still found trending on X. Some users also pasted screenshots that suggest that only 8000-odd tickets were made available for India Pakistan scheduled for 14 October in Ahmedabad. BookMyShow did not comment on this matter.
In a statement issued on 1 September, the online ticket platform had said, “While it is always a race against time to get access to this cricketing extravaganza, we are striving to be able to give you a fighting chance to get access to the tickets.”
Fans who were unable to get tickets so far will now keep their fingers crossed for when the tickets for semi-finals and finals go live on BookMyShow. It is scheduled to be made available from 15 September 8 pm onwards.
