Friday 13 March 2009

offline queuing moved ONLine..Michael Jackson tickets, concerts and tour dates. Official Ticketmaster site.


Michael Jackson tickets, concerts and tour dates. Official Ticketmaster site.

experience of purchasing (trying to) king of pop tickets

wow, I am not the type that complain nor go to concert much.


It proves to be a #bad# time to try to get tickets for such monumental conercert (might be my own monumental mistakes of trying)..

bright sparks of ticketmasters ticket purchase designed it so that it will put in 'waiting' time when one try to find a ticket (typically starting at 15minutes).. then as it counts down, then it will do another 'anti-bot' check, then

====

There was a problem processing your request.

We apologise for any inconvenience.

Your tickets are currently reserved in multiple windows or browsers. Please use only one window to continue processing your request.

====

It keeps on doing that for the plast 3 hours..

Well, I cannot find any answers (as banking systems, exchanges, or even billing system for mobile/fixed line operations has millions of transactions per seconds, or even amazon/ebay..) surely, it is not that difficult!??

possible reasons:

1.) ticketmaster conciously design the system to 'emulate' offline queuing,
2.) system really did get overwhelmed, but it does not justify the 'waiting' time system as the answers is simply, yes/no
3.) pure incompetence

possible solutions:

a) competition of ticketing solution providers (rather than monopoly)
b) in-source it/rather than outsource and use backend/hostings from likes of Amazon
c) don't do online sales, so that people just have to bear it and do it offline and queue..

of course, there are privilages of having all these concierge services of platinum/centurian Amex cards apparently, I tried using the code and even called up the concierge service.. no avail.

as "premium seats allocations" can only be accessed via online.. and "we can call you back monday" but most likely it will be via external ticketing services with extra surcharge.. wow, ticket touting heaven...

might be better to go to cinemas and or catchup on DVDs/Sky+

back to work and erm, venting on blog doesn't really help, punch bag, here I come.

1 comment:

AI King said...

Good results!

Gosh, Amex Plat.Concierge finally came thru. after general release of Michael Jackson's O2 tickets, now I got 4 for Feb10 @normal price.Brilliant or what!

ticket touts (or new breed of them selling via seatwave/amazon/play.com, eat your heart out! ha! )