The Finnish telephone system survived the huge amount of phone calls within Finland and from abroad and never actually fell. YLE is happy for how everything went while many callers might disagree after hearing various messages and never getting even on hold after hours of trying. We are now aware that the number of tickets reserved for the delegations is in the 1000 region.
In the first hour there were over 0,5 million calls, in three over there were one million, says TDC Song, responsible for the telephone lines. “It must be the old time record” says Jaana Kymäläinen from TDC Song. These figures include the calls from abroad. There were over 20 people answering the calls.Lippupalvelu won’t tell how many people actually got tickets by phone. "It is always a lottery in this kind of things” says Seppo Keski-Pukkila from Lippupalvelu’s test group.
“We got through and were kept on hold for 13 minutes”. People from abroad did get through, despite some claims they didn’t. “The block of tickets reserved for abroad, 30%, was sold out yesterday afternoon” says YLE’s Heikki Seppälä.“Friends of mine from the UK tried in vain get tickets through phone” says Raisa Palomäki, a happy fan who got her tickets from Lippupalvelu office. “Where I was, it was a small office and the sales assistants collected from the line information on what kind of tickets they wanted and started printing out tickets as fast as he could at noon and only afterwords started collecting the money, and about 30 people in line got their tickets.” This system seems to have worked well to secure tickets at least to the first ones in line also elsewhere.
Yesterday, esctoday.com exclusively revealed that two further blocks of tickets for theEurovision SongContest finalhad for an unknown reason remained unsold. After publishing the news that these tickets had gone on sale, many of our readers were able to get ticketsfor the music extravaganza in Helsinki.
“Over 1000 tickets have been reserved for various delegations. Unneeded tickets will be sold in March” says Heikki Seppälä
Sales Move to Internet
The unsold tickets will be put on line today at 9am. (290 euros) and individual tickets to semifinal dress rehealses (10-20 euros) left. Next step is Wednesday-Thursday when the unpaid domestictickets return to the market.
