Ticketmaster fills me with unbridled rage, but most of us who enjoy concerts (and in my case, classic rock/metal concerts where I'm pretty much guaranteed that the band will sound good) just put up with it and buy tickets through it anyway.
Well I am about to write a letter to someone. This post is not that letter. No, this post is a furious rant. Please, if you don't like reading about annoying service and/or you don't think the following is real, do not read this. Please. I really, really hate flames.
Anyway. On to the bad service. So first off, my favourite band is playing in Toronto. Now Toronto is a fairly big city so a LOT of bands usually have one or two dates taking place in a large venue here, either at the Air Canada Centre or the Skydome, now named the Rogers Centre. This was at the Skydome. (this might be relevant if you are knowledgeable about whose fault various things are, so you can definitely correct me)
So. This is long. First AC/DC announces their dates for the Black Ice tour on their website and ticketmaster slowly posts on their own website the first date which was November 7th. Tickets go on sale months before at an allotted time. I turn on my computer, several other computers. Try first to get tickets EXACTLY at that time, but fail to. This all happens within minutes as I frantically try to call the line, try different combinations and finally try different computers (and closing pages and such). I am unable to get tickets and extremely frustrated. I stumble across a different website called TicketsNow, and well, surprise surprise, seats show up at $280 a seat before all the taxes as opposed to $112 seats WITH their taxes. Supposedly this site is not associated with Ticketmaster, but tickets had shown up less than ten minutes after. Also, this site charges the same type of fees that ticketmaster does, and has a similar design on it. Coincidence? Yeah, right. If ticketmaster wanted to prevent scalping so much, they would sue/try to stop TicketsNow at the very least, but I have my suspicions.
Then AC/DC announces that their tour is going to grow and they are doing a second date in Toronto. Through the website I join their fanclub (which membership I could cancel at any time but I don't) and I can watch for the date. I go on ticketmaster on time on said date, and because of my fanclub password, I am able to get a pair of tickets. (hooray!!!) I get incredibly lucky and score a third for my boyfriend's brother by calling the ticketmaster order line, but he would not be sitting with us. (He didn't care)
So, this should be just annoying, right? Yes, so far it is just ticketmaster as usual. However we were repeatedly given the wrong information. Initially one of the tickets was supposed to be paperless. What this means is that we had to have the purchasing credit card, credit card statement and ID with us and be let through. Okay. This was the third ticket. The other two were supposed to be picked up at a retail location, because I had selected that option online. So a day before the concert I sent my boyfriend to get our tickets. He had ID and his credit card with him. He goes to the retail location and gets told "oh, these tickets are ALL paperless." A bit weird, but okay. We go to the Skydome and get in line for gate 6, which was where we were told to wait and be let through by the ticketmaster person. We get patted down by security (even on our legs, and they get close to bf's balls but hey whatever, they have to do it), they take away our sealed bottled water (wtf) and we go through but we get told "o this isn't the paperless gate, you gotta go to 6A for that.
At this point, I am ANGRY. We'd been waiting in the cold for quite a while (It was cold that night, and snowing) and we had no water (but we asked for it back). So I ask where's 6A? I get told "I don't know" by THREE security guards. A random guy told us to go around the corner! He didn't even work there. FFS!!! So we go through a noticeably shorter line, get patted down and the young woman swipes the card. She thinks something is wrong. Only ONE ticket shows up as paperless. The one that I had bought over the phone, of course. I said only "oh NO" but she got her manager who came, took the credit card, and sorted the situation out, but that was another ten minutes. This gets better though: she had in her hand our tickets along with a paperless one, which was just a square of paper. She smiles and tells us our tickets weren't paperless. I say bf was told by the person at the retail location that they were paperless, but my feeling is that she was used to the mix-ups because she insisted it wasn't a problem and wished us a good show.
Seating was also confusing on the tickets, but the people inside helped me find my seat... which I didn't really use because of standing and screaming and throwing horned salutes. BTW, the band was amazing. I felt I'd died and gone to rock n roll heaven.
