Having decided it would be pretty good to see the Simon & Garfunkel concert in Auckland in June I got prepared.
Tickets were to be on sale through Ticketmaster this morning. Not having dealt with Ticketmaster before, I spent a bit of time last night registering to use the site and checking out the Vector Arena seating plan to minimise the time it would take to select seats. 9a.m. this morning I was logged in to Ticketmaster and ready to go. Ticketmaster wasn't quite as ready but a minute or two later I was selecting 2 tickets/any price - let's see what the options are.....
Type in the robot prevention words and presto - nothing available that met my selection. OK - try some of the other selection options - same result. Try another PC and two different browsers - same result. Repeat until bored (actually I decided that I couldn't bill my client for the time I was spending and the lost income was mounting up to a significant percentage of the ticket price.)
Try phoning the local outlet a few times - busy every time as expected - that's why I want to do it on line. Actually I got the same result this evening too - one ticket any price. It doesn't say none are available/sold out/you have done something wrong/etc. Just nothing that matches my one ticket at any price criteria.
I guess the answer is to queue at a real outlet - but that is a time consuming process too and no more guaranteed to produce a result. The Internet should be a real alternative. Either sell me a ticket (or 2) or tell me there are none available. Don't screw me around.......
Time to get your act into gear Ticketmaster - booking systems aren't exactly rocket science and the customer experience should encourage not discourage returns.
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Update I have since found out that about 75% of the tickets had been sold in advance and the remainder sold out in 17 minutes. The transaction rate of 1 per second per 1000 tickets sold in 17 minutes is not exactly high performance. If the Ticketmaster systems can't handle that level of load they need sorting out.
Why couldn't they say "Sorry - sold out" or "Sorry the system is overloaded please try later".
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