"Shameless, corrupt and incompetent" - Fans slam BookMyShow & BCCI as pre-sale of 2023 World Cup tickets shows 10-hour waiting time & website crashing

BookMyShow, the BCCI's official partner for the sale of tickets for the 2023 ODI World Cup, trended on X (formerly known as Twitter) and other social media platforms for the wrong reasons on Tuesday, August 29, after it opened a limited ticket sale of India games for the tournament.

Mastercard (a payment-processing network and a tournament sponsor) users were given early access to some tickets from 6 pm IST. However, the sale didn't start immediately. All matches, except for India versus Pakistan, were shown on the screen initially, with the high-octane encounter coming up much later.

Even then, some users were shown a "You are in the queue" window while others were sent back to the home screen as the website crashed. Some even got to choose their stands and update payment info but were added into queues again. The waiting time in these queues ranged anywhere between 20 minutes to 10 hours and kept increasing for a long time as well.

Fans, having already suffered due to delays at the beginning of the sale (in the 2011 World Cup, the process had started almost a year before) and dealing with multiple schedule changes, were livid. Some accused BookMyShow of incompetency while others slammed the BCCI as corrupt and feared they might have to look for illegal ways to get tickets at exorbitant rates.

Here are some of the reactions:

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How can you book tickets on BookMyShow if you missed out on pre-sale?

If you have missed out on tickets for India matches, it is not the end of the world as this was just a pre-sale. Most of the tickets will be sold in a phased manner on BookMyShow.

For India's games in Chennai, Delhi, and Pune, the tickets will go online on August 31. Tickets for Dharamsala, Lucknow, and Mumbai will go out on September 1. Kolkata and Bengaluru tickets will be up for grabs on September 2 and the Ahmedabad tickets, including for the India-Pakistan match, will be available on September 3.