The 2019 Rugby World Cup to be held in Japan next year attracted ticket applications for about 2.5 million seats during their priority ballot sales period from Jan. 19 to June 26, the event's organizing committee announced earlier this month.
The committee says it is very satisfied with the situation. It also stated that it has intensified its ticket sales promotion efforts, aiming to sell out all tickets.
Tickets for about 1.8 million seats will be sold for the event.
At first, two types of bundle tickets were sold during the period: stadium packs to watch all pool matches to be held at one specific stadium, and team packs to watch all pool matches to be played by one particular team. The sales period ended on June 26 with the general ticket sales for the members of the event's official supporters club.
At that point, tickets for games by such powerhouses as the New Zealand and England national teams were very popular, in addition to games by the Japanese national team.
For some categories of seats the number of applications far outnumbered the number of seats available. On the other hand, for some games there were not enough applicants to sell all the tickets the committee prepared.
Akira Shimazu, a senior officer of the event's organizing committee, says that the popularity of tickets and seats largely varies, depending on games and teams.
The committee has set up a project team particularly to prepare for the general ballot ticket sales to start on Sept. 19 and the general ticket sales on the first-come-first-served basis to start in January next year. The team consists of the ticket sales department, the committee's public relations personnel and regional offices located in 12 cities to host games.
The project team will make more efforts to promote selling tickets in a way to be suited for each game venue based on the analysis data on tickets sales so far and information obtained through market research. The project team will also aggressively publicize notable aspects of each game.
"We want to sell tickets by discovering and publicizing interesting aspects of games, in addition to our usual efforts to increase the public awareness of the event itself," said a committee official in charge.
The committee seems to have great enthusiasm for selling tickets because their sales revenues is the mainstay of holding the event and also a decisive factor for its success.
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