World cup finals tickets gone in 15 minutes

Eden Park. Photograph / Richard Robinson.

All Rugby World Cup finals tickets in the public pool are sold after a second-chance offer was snapped up within 15 minutes.

The offer began at 9am on Friday for people who had entered an earlier ballot, and tickets were sold on a first-come-first-served basis.

Tournament organisers said they did not last 15 minutes before the allocation was exhausted.

It is understood this means that there will not be any finals tickets in the public pool when individual sales resume on July 4.

However, travel and hospitality providers still have finals tickets available through packages.

The providers have the opportunity to return unsold tickets to the public pool until the end of this month, but there are not expected to be enough finals tickets left to filter through to the July public sales.

Semifinals tickets were also put on sale in the second-chance offer on Thursday, and they remained available to previous ballot applicants last night.

The semifinals tickets are expected to continue selling through to the deadline, Wednesday at 5pm, and a small number made available to the general public next month.

The offer, from tournament organisers, came as more than 100,000 Eden Park tickets remained with less than 100 days to go to the tournament, and only about half of 1.6 million total World Cup seats filled.

Unlike the previous ballots, which assigned ticket categories at random, the offer allowed people to choose from the cheapest $300 semifinals seats to the most expensive $1300 final seats.

In a personalised promotional email, tournament boss Martin Snedden said: "As you can imagine, tickets to these matches are in extremely high demand, so you will need to act fast."

In the previous ballots, which ended in February, about 60,000 people applied for 45,000 tickets.

Some people missed out and others decided not to take up their offers.

Mr Snedden last month said that reaching the World Cup's sales target of 1.35 million would be challenging but achievable with a hard slog.

"Event history tells you an awful lot of tickets sell once the tournament starts," he said.

"[In some cases] you will be able to rock up and buy tickets at the gate. It's unrealistic to expect we will sell out everything around the country."

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