Tickets for His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama’s April 19 lecture at San Diego State went on sale for the public at 10 a.m. yesterday. Within an hour, every single seat in Viejas Arena was gone.
The Dalai Lama’s upcoming visits to three of San Diego’s universities were sold out before 11:20 a.m. The University of San Diego’s lecture filled up within six minutes.
“With such a high demand and limited capacity at the three universities, it just wasn’t possible to seat everybody who wanted a ticket,” Pamela Gray Payton, assistant vice president of public affairs at USD, said.
SDSU’s Viejas Arena holds 12,000 people. According to Melissa Henss, SDSU’s assistant director of presidential events, every one of those spots was filled before 11 a.m. She said they even had to open up sections they had planned on withholding, in order to meet demand.
“We anticipated it would sell very quickly,” she said.
Henss said the event’s pre-sale, which opened up ticket sales to SDSU students, faculty and staff, sold approximately 4,500 tickets before Wednesday morning. The remaining 7,500 tickets sold in the single hour they were made available to the public.
“We kept telling people, ‘Get your tickets, because they’re going to be gone,’” SDSU Provost Nancy Marlin said. “There’s such great demand and interest to see him.”
SDSU communications senior Chapman Chung, who saw the Dalai Lama once before in Hong Kong, made sure to reserve his ticket early Monday afternoon.
“Everybody should go see (the Dalai Lama) before he dies,” Chung said.
Several university students and community members took to the Internet yesterday to complain about difficulties in securing tickets for any of the three lectures. Twitter user Victoria Renee wrote: “The Dalai Lama tickets sold out faster than Coachella did.”
According to several reports from Twitter, online ticket-purchasing website Ticketmaster was overwhelmed with page requests during the selling period; which meant several hopeful attendees received error messages or got locked out of the site completely.
“Looks like the amount of people trying to get tix for the @DalaiLama is shutting Ticketmaster down,” SDSU alumna Patricia B. Dwyer wrote.
Several students said they did not anticipate how quickly the tickets would sell out. Santa Monica College student Yvette Celaya Alvarez was planning on driving down to attend the SDSU lecture, but said she “had forgotten to check back on when tickets went on sale” yesterday morning. Later that afternoon, she found out the tickets were gone.
Alvarez said she plans on exploring other options to get tickets, which may include looking online. Several ads for SDSU tickets have already appeared on Craigslist, with prices ranging between $75-$110 per ticket. SDSU student tickets originally sold for $11 each, while general admission was $25 per seat.
