While Pan Am organizers made a last-ditch attempt to boost sales by releasing new blocks of tickets Monday, only about 57% of tickets for the games have been sold with only four days to go before the opening ceremony.

Fewer than 800,000 of the 1.4-million tickets available for Pan Am events had been sold as of Monday.

Small blocks of tickets to high-demand, previously sold-out events — such as the opening ceremony, equestrian, basketball, football, diving and athletics — were released to the public Monday.

Pan Am spokesman Teddy Katz said once they’re gone, there won’t be any more of those tickets left.

“The vast majority of the tickets (sold) are Pan Am tickets, and Parapan and Paralympic tickets, in general, traditionally are sold much closer to the event,” Katz said Monday. “We’re very happy. We’ve seen a lot of momentum in the last couple weeks since the torch relay began. People started to see the flame passing through the communities.”

There are approximately 1.2-million tickets for Pan Am events and 200,000 for the Parapan Am Games.

Katz said Toronto’s Pan Am Games ticket sales have been “as good, if not better than most” Pan Am events in the past, including Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2011 and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2007.

“We anticipate that’s going to continue when people see what is available,” he said. “It’s not just sports, but also the arts and culture festivals.”

But a staggering discrepancy lies between the organizers’ optimism about ticket sales and empty downtown hotel rooms that were set aside for the Pan Am Games.

At the Hilton Garden Inn on Peter St., general manager Colin Hogg contended business was better last year when there was “nothing” going on. Right now, occupancy of the property’s 224 rooms is at 65% to 70%, while Hogg anticipated Pan Am alone would fill 70% to 80% of the rooms.

“By this time last year, we were well sold out,” Hogg said Monday. “We had expected a large block from Pan Am, but that hasn’t materialized at all. We’re hoping for that last-minute surge. We were expecting Toronto to feel a lot more pressure from the games. We were hoping to be going great guns right now, but we’re scrambling to try to fill.”

A spokesman for the Greater Toronto Hotel Association, which represents 170 hotels — with 36,000 rooms — across the city, was not available for comment.

But Terry Mundell, the organization’s president, told Postmedia earlier this week, “We are very, very worried.”

Maged Girges, the general manager of the Town Inn Suites on Church St., echoed that sentiment.

“Pan Am is a two-week period and we were expecting to sell higher rates for two weeks out of the month, which should help with our ADR (average daily rate) significantly, and we’re not seeing it,” he said. “Maybe people initially increased their rates so high and scared people off or ticket sales are not doing so well, that’s another factor. We’re disappointed.”

jenny.yuen@sunmedia.ca