Hopeless cynical bunch

“Hopeless cynical bunch”

Written on: 05/08/2012

Their website is slow and stupid, I think perhaps it was written by a monkey. You enter the event, date, number & price band of tickets you were looking for, enter the special "captcha" phrase and eventually it tells you it has no such tickets. It probably has some in a different price band or maybe for a different date but it's not telling you - you have to go back to the start and try all the possible combinations until you might just find some. Any vaguely popular event causes the website to lock up completely on the day the tickets are released so I think they may also be running the whole thing on a couple of old Windows 95 PCs.

Their fees. Just outrageous for what they're actually providing. Service fees, ticket fees, postage fees. Someone should really be nailing these people to the wall for screwing the customer.

Then you wait for your tickets. And you wait, and wait and wait. And they deign to send them out at most 2 weeks before the event. So don't plan to be away during those 2 weeks or you may miss your chance to actually get the tickets you paid for. For example, I ordered & paid for V Festival tickets when they were first released ELEVEN MONTHS before the actual date. It's now less than 2 weeks before the event and they STILL HAVEN'T ARRIVED. But apparently nothing's gone wrong, this is how their wonderful process "works".

Ever tried to speak to a human being at Ticketmaster? It's an interesting ordeal. Just finding a phone number to ring in the first place is quite an exercise, their website really doesn't want to tell you any phone numbers. Then you ring and, unless you choose the right menu option, you end up listening to a pointless recorded message or they tell you to look at their website. The people are quite friendly when you ring but can't really do anything at all to help you because the lumbering unwieldy Ticketmaster machine cannot be altered in any way.

If I could, I would never use them for anything again but sadly they seem to have the market sewn up and for many events Ticketmaster is the only place you can get tickets. I assume they pay the event organisers more than any other ticket websites and just screw the money out of the customer to cover that.

Avoid wherever possible. Whenever they go out of business, it won't be too soon for me.

Visit ticketmaster.co.uk