Paralympics - Tickets Shame

Subject: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST,CJB
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 12:56 PM

Disabled mother 'banned' from sitting with family

Due to a draconian anti-disabled policy LOCOG is BANNING families with wheelchair users from sitting together in Paralympic venues.

Beth says:

"Like millions across the UK, I was inspired by the London 2012 Olympic Games. I decided I wanted to take family to the Paralympics to sample the once in a lifetime showcase of disabled sport in London.

"I am a wheelchair user, with a four-year-old autistic son and a nineteen-month-old baby. Naturally we wanted to sit together and, particularly as it's the Paralympics, I assumed there would be adequate provision for this to happen.

"I was stunned to hear that there was no way that this could happen as there is a [LOCOG] policy that wheelchair users can only be accompanied by one other person. I cannot believe that this event, designed to inspire a new generation of athletes, has a discriminatory ticketing policy.

"It's essential that my husband sits with me as he helps me with things I need to do and clearly my kids can't sit separately. Quite apart from these practical considerations, I want to share this special occasion with my family, but I'm being prevented from doing so just because I am in a wheelchair.

"Please join my campaign to get the organisers of the Paralympics to change this ticketing policy for these and future Games - so every family may share the Paralympics together."

Please sign at:

http://www.tinyurl.com/parabeth

Lord Coe (chair) and LOCOG have declined to respond or act on the petition which is now over 25,000 and approaching 35,000

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 01:21 PM

AND the ticketing fiasco continues:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2187994/Paralympics-2012-Event-set-sell--thats-actually-buy-ticket.html

Usability Hell - ticketing system 'not fit for purpose' and never was ... The comments are illuminating.

http://usabilityhell.com/
http://usabilityhell.com/post/28410304040/london2012-olympic-ticketing-fail#disqus_thread

From EConsultancy ...

http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/10454-why-is-the-olympic-ticketing-website-so-bad

The Ticketing Website in all its frustrations thanks to the incompetence of Live Nation and Ticketmaster who got the contract

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexrees/trying-to-buy-tickets-to-the-london-olympics-is-a

AND THEY NEVER EVEN BOTHERED TO IMPROVE THE SYSTEM FOR THE PARALYMPICS DESPITE WORK-WIDE CONDEMNATION OF THE OLYMPICS TICKETING PROCESS.

The Saddest "Need Tickets" Sign At The Olympics
One family tried for hours to get tickets to see their daughter, representing Mexico, dive in a qualifying round.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexrees/the-saddest-need-tickets-sign-at-the-olympics

BTW the medals were minted by Rio Tinto who have a less than squeaky clean reputation for serious pollution in Utah. Google to find out more.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 01:27 PM

Sorry this thread should be in the BS category.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST,999
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 02:32 PM

I added my name to the list of petitioners. I am pretty sure this would be against the law in Canada. It should be against the law in any civilized country.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Howard Jones
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 06:09 PM

Could it simply be that the space in the venues set aside for wheelchair users only has room one companion seat per user? It's clearly very disappointing for this woman, but it's difficult to see how they could accommodate all the wheelchair users if they were all allowed to have their families along side them.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Leadfingers
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 07:23 PM

If LOCOG cant work out that some disabled people will have families who will want to be with them rather than just one 'handler' , what have the got for brains ??

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Elmore
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 07:42 PM

Nothing to do with music. Sorry for your trouble.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Joe Offer
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 09:05 PM

Somehow, I doubt that the situation is as dramatically shameful as the "petition" makes it to be. I'm sure it's very difficult to build a facility with totally flexible seating accommodations. It seems admirable that the venue has spaces for wheelchair users and the people who attend them. To accommodate an uncertain number of people accompanying a wheelchair, may be too much to arrange for in a single event.
So....flexibility and goodwill is needed by all. Such matters are not handled well by confrontation.

-Joe-

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST,999
Date: 15 Aug 12 - 11:53 PM

It's come to confrontation because it wasn't being handled well. It's a horse and cart thing.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Howard Jones
Date: 16 Aug 12 - 04:23 AM

This woman wanted to bring two children into the area allocated for wheelchair users, in addition to the single companion (included in her ticket price). What about the next person who wants to bring 6 family members, or 12? Would we then be seeing a "tickets shame" campaign because wheelchair users were unable to get tickets because the space has all been taken up by other users' extended families?

With the best will in the world, I do not see how any venue can provide facilities for wheelchair users which also include totally flexible provision for an unlimited number of companions.

There are a number of reasons, including fire safety, why she would not be allowed to have the children on her lap. I would be very surprised if this were allowed for able-bodied spectators so she is not being discriminated against in this respect.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 16 Aug 12 - 11:15 AM

Some venues being used for the Paralympics have refused to sell tickets to wheelchair users because "we didn't expect any wheelchair users to apply."

This lack of forward thinking is typical of how the whole ticketing fiasco has been handled from day one. Its been about profit, corporate sponsors, profit, corporate sponsors, profit - and s*d the public.

Even the athletes were banned from mentioning their own sponsors like thanking them in public; and those that designed and built the superb arenas and stadia have been silenced too.

But the way the disabled - I prefer the physically challenged - have been treated in the lack of provision for suitable seating at the Paralympics is typical of the way that they are treated by the majority of us in general. Not good.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 17 Aug 12 - 04:05 AM

This is the Paralympics. It was originally called "The International Wheelchair Games" so the idea that wheelchair users and their families needed to be seated shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. One would expect that there would have been a whole team of people working to make the events accessible. Apparently, that was not the case.

However, Joe's comment about the need for flexibility and goodwill is really the last word.

This statement, from the petition, sent up red flags for me.

"I am a wheelchair user, with a four-year-old autistic son and a nineteen-month-old baby. Naturally we wanted to sit together and, particularly as it's the Paralympics, I assumed there would be adequate provision for this to happen."

Bottom line is, if you are a person in a wheelchair with an autistic four year old and a baby, it requires a great amount of planning and coordination just to get out the front door, let alone attending a sporting event.

You must figure out who's going to hold the door, who's going to hold the baby, how you're going to get the wheelchair up or down steps, getting in and out of the car, finding an accessible place to park, find the freight elevator, and about a dozen other things that "normies" wouldn't think of in a million years. You have to make it work.

No one who lives with this day in and day out would ever honestly say, "I assumed there would be adequate provision for this to happen. "   

You have to make it work. I know, because I've been in the freight elevator with the baby, the wheelchair, and the autistic kids for the last 20 years.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Penny S.
Date: 17 Aug 12 - 06:51 AM

I suppose the charitable interpretation (and this applies to the dealings with Atos, Remploy and other bodies concerned with care for the vulnerable) is that, though intelligent enough to study at prestigious universities, and be thought of as outstanding at those places, the the people concerned have intelligence of a narrowly focussed variety and are not capable of a broad vision which can take in a complete picture of what the results of their actions might be.

Rather that than that they actually want those afflicted with disability and poverty to go away and die.

Penny

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 18 Aug 12 - 12:30 AM

From this:

LOCOG Assures disabled parents over paralympics tickets

Comes this:

"Locog added that accessible seating is spread around the Games venues and that wheelchair users are not segregated from other spectators. "It is not our policy that wheelchair users can only be accompanied by one other person when attending the Games," a spokesman added."

And this:

"Beth Davis-Hofbauer, a mother of two who uses a wheelchair, also says she was told she would not be able to sit with her children when she tried to get tickets this week. She launched a Change.org petition, urging organisers to change their policy, which now has over 30,000 signatures.

However Locog said this was an issue to do with the availability of tickets, rather than whether spectators were in a wheelchair. More than 2.1 million tickets have already been sold for the Paralympics and many sessions are now selling out. Locog said they could not always help everyone sit together in venues with reserved seats."

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST,CS
Date: 18 Aug 12 - 06:34 AM

So, if she'd booked her tickets sooner rather than at the last minute, the family could have been provided her with the desired seats in a block of four, rather than separately? I don't see any discrimination in that really. I've been in able bodied parties where we've had to sit apart in different rows due to most of the seating at a venue already having been taken.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST,CS
Date: 18 Aug 12 - 07:40 AM

This blog also clarifies that the whole story about the supposedly discriminatory policy is simply untrue:

https://www.baby.co.uk/mum_stories/20120815-this-paralympic-story-would-be-terrible-if-it-was-true/

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: GUEST
Date: 18 Aug 12 - 01:28 PM

From the link above:

Not only is there no policy to separate the families of wheelchair users – the policy is that they give a FREE companion ticket to every wheelchair user. That's the irony of the situation. It is an amazing deal.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 20 Aug 12 - 10:49 AM

Please sign the petition - LOCOG is starting to notice. But the splitting up of families - requiring kids to sit separately from their parents - is a paedophiles paradise. Not good.

https://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/international-paralympic-committee-london2012-review-ticketing-policy-for-wheelchair-users

http://london.indymedia.org/articles/12705

Thank you.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Megan L
Date: 20 Aug 12 - 10:55 AM

I certainly will not sign as a disabled person and wife of a wheelchair user i would automatically check what the availlability of seating chair space was at any venue. Untill all seats are ripped out of all venues then wheelchair space and companion space will be limited most venues i have dealt with do the best they can to alow as many wheelchair users access as possible but at a busy venue there has to be restrictions to alow as many chair users as possible to get in.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Donuel
Date: 20 Aug 12 - 04:44 PM

The primary obligation of a spectator to the corporate Olymics (tm) is to obey and pay.

This is all good training for the public to the needs and wants of Corporate Sponsored events to be paramount to any and all concerns regarding the licensing, trademarks and profitable marketing of official olympic events and broadcasts. The Corporations will be paid, honored and respected.
The peasantry will be tolerated but not coddled.

In corporate speak; The opportunity for competators will be guaranteed to be as equal as possible. Results are not guaranteed.
Spectators will be strictlly controlled and always shown how to exit through the gift shop ;)
This 2012 olympics had strict slander and anti defamation laws to forbid any negative comments concerning the corporate sponsors;
BP, Coca Cola, Mc Donalds, Cadbury...

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 20 Aug 12 - 05:01 PM

The only thing this thread has achieved is to prove that CJB is not the least bit interested in hearing the truth.

It has been diseminating consistently negative bullshit since weeks before the Olympics opened, almost all of it, upon examination, proving false.

Don T.

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 21 Aug 12 - 07:56 AM

American journalist Mary Ellen Synon, now living in Ireland, lost her regular column in an Irish national newspaper when she described the Paralympics as "grotesque"
"In the article, she wrote: 'It is time to suggest that these so-called Paralympics . . . are - well, one hesitates to say "grotesque". One will only say "perverse"…Surely physical competition is about finding the best - the fastest, strongest, highest, all that. It is not about finding someone who can wobble his way around a track in a wheelchair, or who can swim from one end of a pool to the other by Braille.'[7] She advised the disabled and blind to 'play to your competitive advantage' and added: 'In other words, Stephen Hawking shows his wisdom by staying out of the three-legged race.'"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ellen_Synon

Last heard of was on a radio interview in Kerry, when she claimed that it was not just a right for all rural Ireland dwellers to carry arms "to protect themselves and their property, but their duty"
This was around the time that an Irish farmer was acquitted after he had (unquestionably) severely beaten and then shot to death an unarmed and badly injured Traveller, while he was lying on the ground. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_John_Ward
Funny old world
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Paralympics - Tickets Shame
From: ChrisJBrady
Date: 21 Aug 12 - 11:42 AM

And if the issue was really about obtaining tickets, or rather likely not, the experience (truth?) as reported from thousands is typical:

http://usabilityhell.com/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexrees/trying-to-buy-tickets-to-the-london-olympics-is-a

And LOCOG have done nothing to improve that situation.