ecnirp98 you are a star Going to the show later today, hope everyone enjoys the show, have a feeling he will pull off something special.

Also, if you are dissatisfied with your tickets, don't forget to send a complaint to BBC's television programme 'Watchdog'. See also this thread for more information and
Ticketmaster scam theories: http://prince.org/msg/12/236224

Purpleshower said:

Well thankyou purpleshower, glad it worked out well, enjoy the show !

ecnirp98 said:

well it sounds like the VIP Xperience is a joke...no entertainment and the paid bar was 2 xpensive after ur 3 free drinks and some ppl got tiered seating and while those that got good floor seats got poor sound with certain folx causing fights....all in all i think its a rip off farce from start 2 finish as they were selling good floor seats on the day in question 4 31.21....even at 8pm there were empty seats...whats going on???

im regreting buying my VIP seat...anyone that got 31.21 good seats should be proud right now...AEG DID A PISS POOR JOB ....on the other hand the concert last night was fab as i was in block 102 with a fab view and at the end we all got 2 go down 2 the stage 4 the final encore where security were going nuts trying 2 keep the peace....

WOLFY
[Edited 8/2/07 5:33am]
[Edited 8/2/07 5:37am]
[Edited 8/2/07 5:38am]

SquirrelMeat said:

Well I know but its all been such a screw up and I wanted the best seats I could get for a wedding present.

Sucks that people are saying the stage is too high cos my wife is only an inch taller than prince

ecnirp98 said:

ha ha yeah. but i still think its sad that prince does not responce on this one.
maby we all have to put illigal stuf on the internet and then write a message like this underneat it. then we will get his attention.

Hell yeah!

irishwolfhound said:

Hi, I completely agree with you and I'm one of the VIP victims as well. Had Block F2 on the 3rd of august, and couldn't see a thing from there..
VIP party was a joke, as no entertainment, scarce food, and 15 mins looking for my seats..I have sent letter, copy of purchase and pictures of the stage taken from my seat.. you can only see the Band, not the main artist. Awaiting response from Ticketmaster, will keep you informed.
I had another pair of VIP tickets for the 10th of August(block D2) which I knew it would be better but I frankly didn't want the VIP experience again, so I contacted Ticketmaster few days before the event and explained the situation and they refund the money for those tickets ( 10th), but advised me to write a complaint re. the 3rd.Now I have lower tier tickets , which I've paid 31.21!!
I strongly advise all the members affected by it to complaint, do it in writing ( letter better than email), and see what happens..Thanks.

i paid £235 to ensure that i would have a good seat, i wasnt bothered about a buffet or a free drink, however my seat was in f2 behind the drums, i was gutted when i discovered this and it nearly ruined my night, i still had a good time but feel my £235 (acutally £470 for 2) was taken from me under false pretences

how can a seat behind the stage be a good seat, beacuase the stage is so high you cant see much, you are sat underneath the speakers so it doesnt sound good

i think the promoters should be ashamed..

genremusic said:

Me n my sis did the thames cruise vip on the opening nite,we bought our tkts within 20mins of them going on sale on the 1st day n still ended up in Blk D1 row K-we stood lookn at the back of his head 4 most of the gig n the sound was awful(i thought the secc in glasgow used 2 b bad till i went 2 the o2)waitn till my sis comes back from her hols b4 the the complaints get put in-my main gripe being people in the same block as us having better seats who had purchased them long after us n at 31.21...

I took my hub on fri. we went VIP and sat in D1 C12/13 and we really enjoyed it... sure it was shorter than 7th and he still teased us with snippets, but it was fun and we sang and danced and ENJOYED ourselves ...

sound??? great? poor? medium? don't honestly know, but seeing prince close up, all
the expressions and energy and emotion ... it was fantastic and don't let anyone tell you otherwise... every seat seems to give diff experience and to be honest I'm totally fed up with hearing so many people moan about this and that. it's just so good to be seeing him play again - and you're only paying 31.21!

enjoy yourself - we did!

(maybe if we all stop moaning he'll decide that Las Vegas isn't his home and revisit soon ... )

beano said:

Dont get me wrong we did "ENJOY" ourselves-we had a fab time n were lucky enough 2 b let up the front 4 the last 50+mins so we had a great view 4 the encores n the aftershow was superb-any gripe i may have is not directed at the man himself but at AEG n ticketb*...and 2 b honest i'm totally fed up with people telling me "it was only 31.21" 4 the tkts as if that gives me n others no reason 2 complain-we paid 265 quid plus flights plus hotels!!i would rather have paid 265 quid 4 a tkt thats seat was allocated when purchased!!!
I think u'll find this is the general view of most people...

vdal said:

I'm surprised you got a refund out of Ticketmaster, I tried that for my VIP tickets when I got them as I knew they were in block E1 which I argued was a restricted view as i'd been to the O2 before, they would not refund/exchange and said the VIP rickets are allocated by AEG Live and they could/would not do anything.

How did you contact ticketmaster? I rung the customer services number in Manchester.

Yous pay your money and you take a chance. Tough really. But I wouldn't be happy if it happened to me.

Prince VIP Reception and Gold Circle seating

Enjoy a pre-show party in The White Bar, with Buffet, complimentary drinks and entertainment.

Transfer to the very best seats within the first 10 rows on the floor and first 10 rows in the Mid Tiers.

Stage Suites:

Integrated into Princes stage, these exclusive areas give you the opportunity to become part of 3121 and view the show from the closest vantage point! Complimentary Champagne, Beer and Wine as well as soft drinks are served to you by you private waiter in the Stage Suites. Access will also be provided, pre and post show, to The 02 Club lounge (cash bar). Over 18's only.


If you pay £235 or £250 for that then you must be mad, but some people have more money than sense.
[Edited 8/20/07 0:14am]

we also got a kind request!!!!!

Enjoy a pre-show party in The White Bar, with Buffet, complimentary drinks and entertainment.

Transfer to the very best seats within the first 10 rows on the floor and first 10 rows in the Mid Tiers.

preshow?? (not) white bar?? there was no white bar nowbody of the o2 knew it!
buffet??? changed into snacks. entertainment???? not even a cd.
transfer to the seats???? had to find it alone!! verry best seats??? well im just alittle bit taler then prince and i had a verry bad view and the sound was also bad.

prince is not in the speculation business! why should we be! they should did what they promised.
[Edited 8/20/07 4:09am]

I was VIP and yes it was way to mutch pounds!
Compare live earth VIP Front row wembley hole day 150,-.
www.youtube.com be glad this didnt happen.
typ- VIP live earth.

I totally agree with most of you folks, I was underwhelmed by the VIP experience - it was very expensive and failed to live up to my expectations. But am I complaining, well no I'm not. It's just one of those things that had to be done and I think life is too short to moan about what was lacking, let's focus on what was great about it.
I enjoyed the experience and I had good enough seats (8 rows back in D1) and I was with a bunch of the best friends I could ever ask for. So basically I'm thankful that I was able to enjoy the experience to the max, overpriced though it was I wouldn't change it.
Would I buy VIP tickets again - no I wouldn't, but I had big fun on the 11th and so did the people I was with.
What's done is done, let's focus on the positives people.

ZARIA7ETAN said:

I disagree, if you don't complain and let people know how poor it has been handled, they will just keep on doing this, whether its for Prince or the next artist that comes along, maybe Prince will get the message that allot of his valued (valued as in following him for years) fans have been badly treated and ripped off, maybe AEG won't be handling his next tour if his management get to hear about all the problems ....

I won't buy VIP again, infact, I won't buy another ticket without knowing the row/seat number when I pay.

I can still enjoy the concert and the music which I did, i'm not focusing on the bad stuff, but equally I will not ignore it.

ZARIA7ETAN said:

.
.
i thought that as well ....pamela...i knew when i saw where my seats were that i had been had with the vip experience.....so i just decided to make the best of it and i did.....but the more i think about how BAD it was...i feel like i have been robbed....i would have let it all go if i had got really good seats because that was the main reason why i paid the premium price but i didnt even get a seat on the floor or in the middle of the lower tiers....i got two tickets in the corner ...six rows from the front of the lower tiers.....i had a far better view 3 days later with my 31.21 tickets so i have put a written complaint in to aeg and ticketbastard asking for my money back....at least the difference between the normal price and the price i paid....
[Edited 8/20/07 11:22am]

yeah the gig was great but we paid more then 200 pounds extra (a ticket) for the rest. thats more then 400 pounds of my account.
i rather went to gorden ramsey for that money. then i spended my money well on a proper meal. and "complementary drinks".
in my eyes its a crime to rip off people like that. just sell them for the normal price and leave out the VIP????? xperiance.

we also send a letter to aeg live today with help of hour legalassistance insurance.
keep you informed.

Interesting Ticketmaster are now showing block/row/seat number when booking the VIP tickets, I wonder how many of us would have bought the VIP package if we were told the block/row/seat number we ended up with when we originally booked back in May ???


Prince VIP Reception and Gold Circle seating

Enjoy a pre-show party in The White Bar, with Buffet, complimentary drinks and music.

Transfer to the very best seats in the venue (seats will be confirmed at the time of booking).

Event
Prince - Vip Reception & Gold Circle Seating
The O2, London
Tue 28 Aug 2007, 18:00
Your Ticket(s)
Section
Row
Seats
Description
BK B2
G
17
PRICE LEVEL 1
FLOOR SEATING Type1 VIP GOLD CIRCLE PACKAGE Ticket Price£235.00
[Edited 8/21/07 15:47pm]

ecnirp98 said:

wow....thats the way they should have done it from the start...im pissed that i bought VIP....were treated like shit...not like VIP....

WOLFY
[Edited 8/22/07 14:24pm]

fivelive want to hear about it

http://prince.org/msg/12/240687

My Experience of o2 pre-sale and VIP sent to Fivelive:

Well it seems so long ago when the news came out about '21 Nights in London', and my desperate scramble in early May to find a friend with an o2 contract phone so I could pinch the pre-sale booking priority code. After countless emails and phone calls I tracked down a friend who had one - my Prince adventure had just begun.

That infamous Thursday morning arrived, and I had a 9.30 meeting in Wimbledon. There I was at 8.50am sat on the train, Laptop on my lap and wireless data card plugged in and ready to roll. 9 am arrived and "bam!" I was in Ticketmaster and waiting for that 5 minutes ticker to roll down to see what glorious pre-sale tickets I could get my hands on for Friday August 10th, the day after my girlfriend's 28th birthday - she is also a mad Prince fan. After losing my wireless connection going through a couple of tunnels, I finally got through to some tickets at 9.20am as my train pulled in. Laptop in hand I fumbled around getting off the train and sat on the platform. Upper Tier Block 404??? What!! Surely this must be the biggest scramble for Prince tickets in history. Damn - if it's that busy and I can't even get a lower tier, let alone floor seat, I'd best settle for less and get them.

That night I revealed the news to my girlfriend that the best tickets at 9am seemed to be crappy upper tier - she was knocked for six, and had been so looking forward to the 'up close' experience of the One Nite Alone tour we shared 3 times late in 2002. That night, while pondering options and surfing eBay I came across a thread on Housequake mentioning VIP tickets - my chance to redeem myself!

So that very night, still before tickets went on general sale, I bought 2 VIP tickets for Friday August 10th at £235 pound a pop – at the time I booked them there were very little details, and I was expecting something truly amazing for the price. As with many loyal fams my reason was not purely to have a ‘VIP’ experience, but simply because of the deceitful communications coming out of the Prince and AEG camps that Prince (an artist who only shifted 80,000 copies of his last album in the UK) has somehow shifted 300,000 tickets in the single opening day of sales (“first 15 shows sold out” we were told, and how stupid we were to get duped). I blame myself really having followed Prince like a puppy dog for 18 years – I should have known better, considering his waning popularity in the UK, that he could have never have achieved such a feet. Anyway, I digress – the 2 tickets were the only chance (it appeared) to see him up close and personal, and who knows what else for such a extravagant sum – I was totally psyched about the whole experience (if less so about the credit card bill).

Anyway, I eagerly awaited the initial reviews of the VIP packages from the first few concerts in anticipation of my own – but all was not well. Initial rumours suggested that what was advertised as a ‘free-bar, food and entertainment’ was in fact 4 drinks and a few nibbles! Well, to be honest I can’t imagine I’d get more than a few beers in anyway, especially if I wanted to remember the show. Then it seemed that apart from the ‘seats in the first 10 rows’ advantage, that was all the VIP package provided. No ‘goody-bags’, no sound-check preview (which used to be a standard offering for the NPG Music Club members a few years back, and then we only had to pay a mere fraction of the price - $92 and $34 if I recall).

I must admit it had my suspicions aroused when I received my tickets through a couple of weeks before the event – a ‘shoddy’ un-personalised wonky photocopied letter was all that accompanied my tickets, confirming the ‘plastic bottles of pop and a sausage-roll’ concerns I had previously been informed of.

Anyway, forwarding to the night itself – we queued up at Entrance H (well, some barriers 300 yards down the walkway), but were eventually allowed to make the march up to the doors just the 20 minutes after the advertised opening time (nothing like letting us make the most of our “couple of hours” VIP), but at least it meant I could more easily spread the consumption of those drinks and nibbles to fill the time before the show started.

My most enduring memory of the VIP lounge was ‘how different’ it appeared to the ‘chicken-in-a-bucket’ self service motorway style lounge I had earlier noticed at Entrance B – thank god we got the swish lounge at the back, even if it did take 15 minutes up the escalators and along never ending corridors to find the place. £235 per person for self-service road-stop café is hardly the things dreams are made of…..but we were the lucky ones. Next I became acutely aware that of the ‘hundred or so’ so-called VIP’s in the room, our tables seemed to be the only ones being served ‘nibbles’ – more than once we had to offer our food up to those staring longingly across in the hope that maybe the serving staff had not forgotten them – unfortunately they had.

After making some wonderful acquaintances it was then time for the show, so we waited for our ‘escort to our seats’ which seemed obligatory for such an extravagantly priced experience. “Come this way sir – you need to go back down where you came from” – ah, that 15 minute walk – “…then go up some more escalators to block 106 and 107 where you can get access to your floor seats……right, bugger off now” – well, in not so many words! Oh, so basically we had traipsed all this way for a few plastic beers and some sausages on sticks only to be told we had to go back all the way round and enter with all the other concert-goers…..and there was only 10 minutes until kick off!

Well, we made it round in time, took our seats, surprisingly next to a Dutch couple who were sat “in front” of us and had paid face value for their tickets – strange, I would have thought these seats were just for us ‘special types’! Well, I had already heard that subject to poor sales, and incredulous selling and marketing techniques, AEG and Ticketmaster had begun selling the same seats we had spent £470 on for £31.21 each, as we were now all acutely aware, all the best seats ‘were not’ sold on the opening day, and in fact you could get ‘better’ seats than ours through Ticketmaster for face value only days before the event.

Anyway, we found ourselves stuck up close to a 6 foot high stage, and could barely see the ‘Purple One’ during any of the show, as he is not the tallest of chaps you know. Coupled with the fact that the sound where we were standing (at the side) was ‘appalling’, it really did not make either of us feel like ‘very important people’. At one point Prince made his way directly over to our side, and was stood ripping up a guitar solo only feet from our seats – the only problem was that we couldn’t hear a note, as the speakers in front of us intermittently cut out. He was playing the thing, but damned if we could hear any more than the feedback from the speakers in the roof! Oh, and not to mention they had shoved a smaller speaker on top of the bigger speakers in front of us, which made one section of our view completely obscured to Prince, the band, or any other person who may have been wearing stilts for all we could tell.

Of course, it was not all bad – but the next night we returned with similar floor seats for £31.21 each, and were rewarded with a much better view and incredible sound.

Prince and AEG Live should be ashamed of themselves! The true long-time followers who helped keep the career of this genius musician afloat had been well and truly screwed for a quick buck, and we ‘aint happy about it!

Yours ‘lighter in the pocket, but with memories which lay heavy of the heart of a dedicated Prince follower’
[Edited 8/22/07 15:05pm]
[Edited 8/22/07 15:09pm]

irishwolfhound said:

:wtf: Wolfy, do you go to a Prince concert to guzzle beer and eat finger foods... or do you go to watch the man in action. Why didn't you just go to your local pub and guzzle beer, eat finger foods and listen to your Prince CDs.
Stop complaining! I am sure he gave a great performance too bad you were so hung up to see through it all.

pplrain said:

thats not the point. the concert was great but the thing is when they promis you something big and you pay more then 200 pounds extra for it and in the end they do not do the things they said. then that is stealing in my eyes.

pplrain said:

You could of course ask another question - why does an artist like Prince allow his fans to be ripped off?

pplrain said:

Or....instead to trying to tell people what they should or should not accept in the instance of customer service, you could fuck off to somewhere where your comments are more helpful?

SquirrelMeat said:

here here...some folx have no class....its not the £££ im worried about...i freely paid that princely price after i could not get upper tier or lower tier seats on the day they went on sale....however the true fans have been fucked over including myself.....this is my last tour that im going 2....prince fucked me 4 the last time....going 2 spend my ££££ on my daughter in future....

WOLFY
[Edited 8/23/07 5:32am]
[Edited 8/23/07 5:33am]