WASHINGTON, Jan 10: In less than a minute, 5,000 tickets were sold on Friday for highly-prized seats along the US presidential inauguration parade route, the ticket sales company Ticketmaster said.

All the tickets were “sold in less than one minute,” said Ticketmaster spokesman Albert Lopez, adding that 94 per cent of sales were made online and six per cent of sales took place over the telephone.

Tickets for seats in bleachers set up between the US Capitol and the White House on a route to be travelled by the new president Barack Obama and his vice president Joe Biden were made available at 1:00 pm (1800 GMT) at a cost of $25 each.

A vast number of seats to witness the swearing-in ceremony and the inaugural parade are reserved for elite guests, dignitaries and Washington insiders.Lopez estimated the sale was “a great one.” As soon as they were purchased, the previous tickets were already on sale on other websites, with prices up to $300, 10 times their original price.

Online forums were ablaze with critics of those trying to make a quick buck on the Obama tickets.

“I saw someone is selling them for $200 each. I think that is disgusting ... If someone isn’t selling them for the $25 they were sold for, it is illegal and they should be arrested,” said “KrazyKat” on the dcist.com website.

Ticket-holders will secure coveted bleacher seats along the parade route, but they will not be alone. Organizers expect at least two million people on the National Mall to witness Obama being sworn in as the nation’s first African-American president, and hundreds of thousands more are expected to stand along the 1.7-mile parade route.

Presidential Inauguration Committee executive director Emmett Beliveau said releasing the tickets was “part of our commitment to holding the most open and accessible inauguration in history” on Jan 20.

“The Inaugural Parade is a celebration of America, and we are working to make sure that as many citizens as possible can take part in this historic tradition,” he added in a statement.

Officials initially put the numbers of inauguration day visitors to Washington as high as five million, but have since scaled back their estimates.

Tickets are not needed to stand along the parade route, but first-come first-serve spots along Pennsylvania Avenue will likely be hard to come by for the throngs of visitors.—AFP