Nightmares before Christmas, with tickets to spare
18 months ago I successfully bought tickets online to the Red Hot Chili Peppers concert (which sold out super fast). At the time I was proud of myself and thought little of those who complained about missing out.
Yesterday I had a sobering experience.
Ticketek has serious problems. Whenever tickets for a big act go online the site fails. It’s been happening since 2005 and as recently as 3 days ago. It happened again this morning when I tried to buy tickets to the Kings of Leon concert in Wellington for my brother. I tried multiple times to purchase tickets and each time was met with an error message.
Ticketek seems to think it’s fine for their website to routinely break during credit card transactions. Hey, who cares as long as the tickets get sold. Haven’t they heard of elastic computing?
In the 36 hours since then my experience with Ticketek has been a nightmare. They don’t publish their phone number on their website, nor do they don’t answer their phones. I was directed to call an Auckland number (toll call) which led to a “common mailbox”. To top it off, their ticket purchase form breaches the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act.
{I have deleted several paragraphs of ranting here}
This morning was like christmas.
I woke up to find almost $1200 had been taken from my credit card. That’s exactly the cost of 12 Kings of Leon tickets. I suspect my repeated attempts were being processed even though the website kept throwing up errors. My brother only wants 4 and I’ll be out of town at the time so I’m selling the rest for cost (approx $95 each).
Information on the concert is here. Anyone want some reserved seating tickets?
Update: It took a visit to the Ticketek office but I now have the tickets in my hand.
