Shanghai Disneyland opening tickets sell out within hours

If you're looking for tickets to Shanghai Disneyland's opening day on Jun. 16, you're probably out of luck.

Tickets were sold out within hours of going on sale at midnight on Monday, Bloomberg reported Monday.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

People who don't mind missing out on the big opening extravaganza can still get tickets for the days leading up to Sep. 30, which are priced between 370 yuan ($56) and 499 yuan ($76).

Disney had said in earlier local reports that the pre-sale was arranged in order to give the park time to plan for and manage crowds on opening day and deal with counterfeit tickets.

This is Disney's first theme park in mainland China -- Hong Kong Disneyland opened in 2005. Shanghai's $5.5 billion theme park across 963 acres is three times the size of Hong Kong's, and was set to open at the end of 2015, but ended up getting delayed till mid-2016.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

If analyst estimates are right, Disneyland might break even within its first year of operation. An analyst from Changjiang Securities said in a research note that an estimated 50 million visitors are expected annually -- a volume that can net Disneyland some 24 billion yuan ($3.7 billion) to 40 billion yuan ($7.2 billion) in revenue.

Disneyland's tickets are reportedly tied to individual IDs in order to prevent ticket scalping -- a common practice in China. However, a check on popular marketplace Alibaba Taobao showed plenty of sellers hawking their services to queue up for tickets on behalf of buyers.

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