Ticketmaster Online - grrrrrr!

[stevsko]

Now I'm really mad!

I was shut out of GW tix trying online (multitude of errors) and with the phones (busy busy busy) like many others here. After several hours of calm-down time (and a Husky hoops win!) I sat down to write a structured vent to TM (see below), fully expecting to receive the corporate response of "we're sorry, try harder next year", or "there's nothing we can do about it", if any answer at all. That part of their site doesn't work either - no acknowledgement or any indication that your message has been sent. I'll keep trying to send my email until I get a response. I know it won't change anything or put tickets in my hand, but at least I made my voice heard, probably to some $6/hr lackey who sifts through the customer service emails. Maybe if enough of us write something constructive, a higher-up will see some of them. A long shot, but what the heck?

I, like many other PHs, am also disappointed that Jimmy doesn't play larger venues now that he's cut back on touring, or partake in a Dead/Phish-type of mail-order system for tickets. Meanwhile, it's time to explore other options for Bubba tickets this year...

BTW, congrats to those of you who got lucky! There are a lot of envious PHs everywhere tonight... _^^_

http://www.ticketmaster.com/h/emailform.htm

I attempted to purchase tickets for Jimmy Buffett at the Tweeter Center in MA earlier today and ran into several problems with your online ticketing service. I design e-commerce websites for a living and find it very difficult to understand how TM can put a site in service which is incapable of handling the load at peak ticket times. Proxy errors, servers timing out, security features not working, and long queues which do not accurately state waiting times or worse yet lead to a 'site overloaded' error, all represent an unacceptable product for the price we pay as consumers in ticket convenience charges and for the amount of banner and pop-up advertising on your site. The current version of your website is fairly new and supposedly designed to limit scalpers and people running automated programs from buying all of the available tickets, but when nobody can get through - what is the point of having an e-commerce site at all? I should mention that I am running a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 with a 1.2 Mbps DSL internet connection so the problems I encountered were not on my end of the transaction, and postings on fan sites show that many other people ran into similar problems. In addition to the obvious need for an infrastructure upgrade, perhaps your problem lies in ticket on sale times, with several east coast Buffett shows, Springsteen in NJ, Aguilera/Timberlake, as well as many other local events all going on sale at 10am. With the service charge revenue generated on each and every ticket sale, TM really needs to re-evaluate its procedures and website to make ticket availability fair to all customers. I am thoroughly disappointed in the quality of your service...

[phjrsaunt]

Very well stated. I had a lot of trouble also, and about fourteen heart attacks.

[Beach95]

I would like to know what the ticket limits were where other people tried to buy tickets. We live north of Boston, and tried driving to Burlington, VT to buy tickets. We called ahead and the lady at Filene's said that they never have more than 20 people in line and normally everyone gets tickets......We would then ski a half day at Stowe.....

That being said, there were about 53 people there (probably 30 of them were college students - who I doubt were driving 300 miles south to a Buffett in show in Aug....one girl who got a pile of tickets didn't even know where Great Woods was!?!?!) Two or three of the college kids got the first few numbers in the raffle....

Back to my original question.....I thought there was a 4 ticket limit per show, total of eight tickets if you bought for both shows?????? Well the genius' in VT sold the first 5 people in line 8 tickets each for each show....16 tickets per person!!!! 3 out of the 5 were working for scalpers. One person turned around and sold tickets to people still waiting in line!!!

All in all, about 10 people got through the line before the shows were sold out. My fiance and I were #'s 43 and 47 in line, but our friend was ninth, which netted us 6 individual tickets, 3 under the shed and three in the new seats in front of the lawn. Each ticket was an idividual sale....VERY SLOW!!

The first person not to get tickets was girl ..... she just broke down crying.....very sad

I can stomach the scalpers because it gets me tickets, but today was pretty pathetic. They should at least have a cop at the ticket outlets policing these scalpers. If they are going to do their business, don't do it in front of everyone else.

[Tampico]

beach I feel your pain but the sad part is the Scalpers have done nothing wrong (illegal) at this part. Paying someone to stand in line for them is not against the law and depending where they are living re-saling the ticket for a big profit may not be against the law (New Hampshire has no anti scalping laws). Last year there was a cop in the store where I bought tickets and he said he knew exactly what was going on but until the tickets where resold no law had been broken. Where you were at they were using college kids where I was at they were using 14/15 year old high school kids who were more than happy to stand in line for 20 bucks.

[BottleofRum]

I can stomach the scalpers because it gets me tickets, but today was pretty pathetic. They should at least have a cop at the ticket outlets policing these scalpers. If they are going to do their business, don't do it in front of everyone else.

The limit was 8 per person per show! We went to Pittsfield Ma and there were about 70 peopl ethere, i was 11th or so in line and got tix.

As far as Police posted at outlets, so long as the scalpers are not reselling the tickets there is no law against buying them. A scalper could have the first 10 spots in line so long as they are not trying to resell them in line they are not breaking the law. I also believ that Vermont doesn't have a scalping law but not 100% on that.

[kenpo]

hey fellow fins,,
I grew up in South Fla. and luckily for me Parrotheads wasn't even a word yet.. I was 12 years old then, "77 OK I'm dating myself but i don't mind.And that has been my history as a Phan..
Re; the tix being hard to get, i have done it all from camping out,to buying tix at a show, to paying upwards of $1,000.00 a piece for front row.
from uhh. "brokers" yeah right rapists are more like it.
I have ran into the problem of other concerts going on sale at the same time, at TICKETbASTArd .. even being the next in line and sold out when my number came up and the guy in front of me had 8 tix for Bubba, and bought like 8 tix a piece for 6 different concerts, not including Bubba... I wanted to smack him,, but kept my cool.This past year I have been lucky,, a hint , I log on
about 1-2 hours prior to tix on sale, and damn, i know carpel tunnel is going to set in but i hit refresh every minute about 30 minutes prior to
the sale within 6 minutes prior i hit refresh repeatedly... believe me it's worse than video games.. but i have received my tix doing this...
sorry for dragging this out but it works... I also just do road trips up and down the east coast and midwest and never have had a problem getting tix in the parking lot area... so don't get down,, you can get tix you just have to work for it...wishing y'all.. all the best... and party on LIKE REAL SAILORS !!!..... good luck..hope this helps..

[viess]

Kenpo,
I tried your same trick with the refresh button 10 minutes before sale time (with a cable modem) and got nothing, so I guess there really is no fail proof plan! Congrats on getting tickets!

[kenpo]

OK,
you're right it has crashed on me too... in my other posts I mentioned,
that if our local chapter of PHIP gets us tix,, I always do fair trade,, so
I can sit with our fellow Parrothead Phamily,, then I release my seats for costs..., that way if i don't get seats maybe someone will sell to me at cost..
KARMA is a very real noun.. that comes back to haunt... so the scalpers will get theirs... keep your fingers crossed gang , that we have our INDY seats and if we do,, I will post for face value and service fee..
me thinks it was $8.50.. from ticketbastard...
regards phlock,
james

[well duh]

stevsko -- EXCELLENT POINT!!!! I don't know too many people who were not subject to the the MANY MANY shows that TM put on sale at the same tme this morning: what in the world woudld be wrong with them spacing them a little bit to balance the load on their server?

It seems to me if someone around there sat down and thought "well, we ought to stagger these sale times a couple of hours so as to make our system work"... well, it's TM, would never happen. I seem to recall that there were (shudder) Christina Aguilera/Justin whatever (sp) sales going up against Buffett tickets and (regular people might want these) Springsteen tickets... last year, it was, if I recall correctly, Paul McCartney going up against all of this -- no matter what you like, why don't they stagger the on-sale times a bit to reflect demographics? I don't think I'm the dumbest person on earth: why does this not occur to people at TM?

[PHISHEAD]

I want of to say im 23 years old and I love Buffett ive seen him 14 times i started back in 96. But to get to the point F ticketbasterd. My dad waited in line for merriweather and nissan tickets. They both sold out with 2 people in front of him. Well I was on a cable modem (which u all need to get buffett tickets online) i got through for 6 nissan 4 merriweather well then i found out you couldnt use the same billing address. my brother was using my dads credit card and I was using my credit card but they have the same billing address. my brother got 6 nissan and 4 merriweather tics. its a 6 tic limit so i called him but didnt know he already got through trying to stop him so are orders didnt get cancelled but he already did. so in our emails we both got confirmed for a total of 10 nissan and 5 merriwearher. so i hope it works out still. My dad told me pavilon sold out in 3 min only the 1st 2 people in line got pavilon. All the tickets we got were pavilon I got mine 15 min after they went on sale my brother said he got his 20 min after. Plus we wanted camden but it said only pa,del, and nj could order tickets. thats bulls*it. i have alot more to say but im drunk and dont feel like typing anymore. peace

[Beach95]

What got me the most in VT was the Ticketmaster outlet selling 8 tickets per show. Allowing the first 5 people in line to get 16 tickets. And throw in couple people buying Justin Timberlake tickets.....

[Nautical Squealer]

Cable modem,but no tickets. Thanks ticketmaster. I should have tried for Camden first instead of Nissan. Oh well, it's off to the broker I go. I wonder if the brokers give you a tube of KY when youy buy tickets.

[jiggs]

begin vent

I too have a cable modem and I think the only advatage with it is you can recover from the errors faster...once you get the 'proxy' error you can hit back and be requesting again much faster. I don't think that TM is willing to put the infastructure in place that would be required to take that many hits considering it is only for a handful of hours every satruday morning. They should really consider buying processing power from big enterprises that don't use any more than 10% of thier power over the weekend.

And its not only TM, Tickets.com is just as bad. They have many of the MLB teams and opening day sales are slow there too.

I'm not sure what the answer is, all I do know that if the internet worked the way everyone wanted it to, there would be no use standing in line because only the first person or two would get tickets...

Its a really bad busieness model that TM has, but when they are 'the only game in town' we continue to go back...

end vent

[Beachbruce]

You know, it doesn't really matter what color you paint a scalper, or how you camoflage him, they are all the slime of the earth, and they stink. They prey on those less fortunate and it irritates the hell outta me. Trouble is, people use their services. They're kinda like whores-they wouldn't be there if there wasn't a demand for their services. I hate em!

[phrankbama]

Excellent point about spacing out the on sale times, it would even make sense to space out the time for Bubba's shows, don't have them all go on sale at the same time, but that all makes too much sense.
When you're using the internet, it's all luck. I don't have a cable modem and still got through and was able to grab 4 tickets to Nissan in the Pavillion. It must have been my day.

[BottleofRum]

Unfortunately Jimmy Buffett is one of probably over 10,000 events Ticketmaster handles and they know it will sell out within ½ hour regardless of when they put the tickets on sale, to them Buffett is just another show. By spacing out the on-sale times that would create more work for Ticketmaster and more work means less money for them. I don’t think Ticketmaster a really cares who buys the tickets from them they are going to get the same amount of money regardless who buys them. I was lucky enough to get tickets yesterday but 75% of the people inline with me did not get tickets. Some of the people who got tickets were Buffett fans some were obvious scalpers but most of the 75% who didn’t get tickets were, as expected pretty p*** off. Each year it is getting harder and harder and realistically we all know it is never going to change, Buffett is never going to go with a mail order system because Ticketmaster owns the ticket rights to almost every venue he plays, Will Call could work but it could also be a disaster (20,000 people in line the day of the show trying to pick up their tickets and there still would be parking lot scalpers) not to mention the extra people that would have to be employed by Ticketmaster and the venue. I still say the best bet is drive as far away as you can to a Ticketmaster outlet with as many people as you can and try to win the lottery or at least get in the top 10-15 this has worked for me for several years. The place we went to was small record store that has a Ticketmaster computer that you can see from the outside so you know what is going on. At places like Filenes when they make you wait inline while they take small groups of people in that takes time and each minute that passes more tickets are being sold elsewhere. There really isn’t a 100% sure way to get tickets, unless you consider eBay as a sure way.