It's 5:45PM. 15 minutes to go before tickets for the Arctic Monkey's tour go on sale. You've already missed out on the pre-release tickets because of a problem with Worldpay, so you're pretty keen to get your hands on them from a 'specialist' -
seetickets.com. Not too keen on buying of eBay, you head over to the site. 10 minutes to go, site down. Looks like bad news- but hey- you're optimistic. They'll get it sorted by six. The clock ticks on. Still down. Might have to phone the premium number instead. It's gone six. Still down, premium number busy. Damn. You keep redialling, only to get the same message - lines busy - yadda yadda. Half an hour later, after many refreshes, and with all the tickets sold out, the website miraculously returns.
Isolated incident? We wish. The state of online ticket services is
appalling. Dominated by a few companies with a stranglehold on the market, consumers are forced to pay fees for any number of 'services' - inflated postal costs, service charges, you name it. Service is often sloppy, with issues like double payments not un-common. The convenience of e-buying, so readily found with many online vendors, is killed in this market. Why on earth do we tolerate it?
A lack of any other choice is probably the best answer. With little competition from other companies (due to the very close links ticket vendors have with event promoters), vendors have little to fear in terms of losing customers. Ironically, the closest competitors they face are probably touts on eBay, which, depressingly, often offer much better service - albeit at inflated prices. At the time of writing, two tickets retailing for just 28 pounds in total were being sold for
185 pounds on eBay - 6 1/2 times the retail price.
The main gripe most would raise with these companies is that whilst they do offer online booking, the services are often down at the most popular times. How, you might ask, is it possible for a company to provide such a poor service? When one considers other e-services - eBay, Amazon, Google, - all managing many millions of users daily, the weak performance these companies offer is well and truly exposed. Even Neowin (according to Alexa, a web traffic service) appears to maintain a higher level of traffic than seetickets.com.
Why, asides from complacency, do online ticket companies do this?
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