Purple haze over Prince ticketing fiasco

May 27, 2012

The Purple One will return to Rod Laver Arena on Wednesday for the last of three Melbourne shows. But while Prince (pictured) has been feeling the love on this visit, the fallout continues from the ticketing fiasco leading up to the tour. We’ve heard of at least one concertgoer who discovered that her credit card had been billed for two tickets to his opening Melbourne show on May 14. Problem was, she’d actually bought six tickets for the next night. She was charged for all of them, and the May 14 tickets went unused. So much for soldout shows. The cockup dates to the fiasco in April when Ticketek’s website had a meltdown on the first day of sales: when sales failed near point of payment many customers went back and tried again. In one case, at least, Ticketek pocketed the money from some of the frantic clicking. The company has agreed to a refund.

The captcha part to determine that humans are buying the tickets (not an automated computer program) was turned OFF when I attempted to buy tickets for the 1st Sydney show on the morning the tickets 1st went on sale.

That morning I was only able to get on the ticketek site through my mobile phone, and I only got on twice in the 1st hour they went on sale. Each time I was offered terrible seats a few times. So I decided to wait and see if a 2nd show would be added. By the 3rd hour that morning it was possible to access Ticketek on my pc as well as my phone. For the 2nd show again I was offered terrible seats, but took them.

I would like to know why the captcha was turned off - sounds dodgy to me. As a result there were heaps of ebay sales saying they had 10 excellent seats all together. I was only trying to buy 1 seat, and it was always a terrible spot.