This is my alternative to murder
April 16th, 2011
Trying to buy tickets for my mom to see The Lion King on Ticketking. Here’s what the experience is like:
- Pick a date
- Choose between “best available” and a series of meaningless categories, like “Dress circle H-K”
- Squint at blurry diagram of theatre that presumably shows where seats are
- Give up and choose “best available”
- Decide to not buy the $2,000 tickets that are “best available” after looking in vain for a “How about the best that aren’t $2000?” button
- Click “Try again”
- Choose a random non-$2000 ticket category
- Get an error because it doesn’t remember how many tickets I wanted the first time
- Re-enter the number of tickets I want
- Get an error because previous error made it forget my random non-$2000 ticket category
- Choose BOTH a ticket category and a quantity
- Get a message saying there are no tickets available for that quantity or category
Repeat 200 times. I more or less wrote this instead of finding the designer of the site and doing my version of the Saw movie series on him or her.
Must be designed by the same people who do the Blue Jays’ online ticket sales, except you don’t mention having to constantly reselect which *date* you wanted, in addition to price point and quantity.
Ticket websites are almost universally bad - I just went through a similar process buying tickets for Cirque. At least for the Cirque website, they give you a good idea of what the seats and sight-lines are like. Often I’ll just call the box office and do it that way, or if I can, actually go to the theatre so I can look at the seat.
Of course, you still have to pay all the service charges, even if you actually go to the theatre.
About two years ago when I bought tickets for Ricky Jay at the Bathurst St. Theatre I was going through the similar frustration so I called and asked if I could go over and buy the tickets in person. But no - buying through the crappy website was the only way to do it.