London 2012 Olympics: Ticket resale site remains in the cold as officials battle to make the start line

The setback overshadowed a meeting of David Cameron and his Cabinet at the handball arena that was meant primarily to discuss developments in the legacy plan.

Locog officials say they want to iron out all glitches before they relaunch the resale site, which allows customers the chance to offload unwanted Olympic tickets at face value. But it has emerged that Locog, before they launched their site, had rejected guidance from one of the ticketing industry’s leading figures, Joe Cohen, the chief executive of Seatwave and a former senior executive with Ticketmaster for Europe.

Seatwave has offered real time buying and selling of tickets for more than five years. Cohen said Locog lacked accountability because its ticket site was a monopoly and he urged 2012 organisers to allow other ticket sellers to become involved.

“It comes back to accountability,” he said. “Locog doesn’t have to worry about customers coming back or if they go down the road to another seller. They are insular and opaque.”

Behind the scenes, Olympic sponsor Ticketmaster has been furious that Locog has pinpointed it as the culprits.

Some resale sites have a window of time between tickets being made available and when they are able to be bought. But having the tickets listed, offered for sale and purchased at the same time overwhelmed the 2012 site. Talks between Locog and Ticketmaster have continued around possibly providing a system with a time delay.

“We are looking to get the system as perfect as possible and we are looking into all of the issues,” said a Locog spokesman. “The website will be suspended until some of these issues are resolved”.

Hundreds of tickets were uploaded and sold during the initial hours of the resale system last Friday before the high levels of traffic prevented people from accessing the system to upload any tickets. Prospective buyers also found out that tickets they believed they were purchasing were unavailable at the final point of payment.