Gahh! I just payed $93 and some sense (pun intended) to be abused, neglected, tormented, and ripped off!
Let’s go back over this, in the hopes that by telling my story here I won’t have nightmares or dreams of retribution for weeks to come. I’ll start at the very beginning of my epic tale of woe, poor website construction, and vapid, money-sucking value-less middlemen…ehem…
We know we wanted to go see Audio A, as the band is doing its final tour. We heard the advertisements on the radio, and after a few weeks decided to get tickets (even though Audio A isn’t the main act) because this is one of our all-time favorite groups. So the easiest thing, we think, would be to go to the radio station’s website as they recommend, and find the details from there (104.7, The Fish is the station).  Unfortunately, this is the first of the poor web designs that I run into. It took me awhile, but by being determined I do find a link to the concert of interest.
This leads me to iticket.com, where my frustrations really escalated. You see, there’s a nice description of the concert – where, who, when – but that’s it. It looks like a site that sells tickets, but there doesn’t seem to be any indication of how to buy tickets! I click in vain, only to get bounced around to various sites that are all HAPPY to tell me what I already know about the concert, but NOTHING ELSE. I even create an account and login to iTicket, thinking maybe then they’ll let me spend my money on the ticket, or at least give me a little more information. Nope. (I later discover, by diligent browsing, that some concerts do have tickets available online – just not, apparently, this version).
I do find a number on the Arena website for calling in to order a ticket, though it also has a link to ticketmaster, which leads me back to the same fruitless cycle as before. Finally, I come to the conclusion that I’m not sure why I can’t do it online, but it must be easier to order by phone. This is when I really get frustrated.
I’ve already seen reference to 2 classes of seats at the Arena, regular and “artist circle”. What those areas consist of, and where I might find out more about them, though, takes a skilled internet surfer (me) quite a while to guess at. I’m still not entirely sure.
Back to the phone-call: First I yell at an automated system for about 2 minutes, before the automated system gives up at trying to find the concert I want. Whoever is in charge of that system at Ticketmaster needs to dump it in the trash and start over – it didn’t even try very hard, and couldn’t understand a thing! At least it finally passed me to a real person.
This person was able to book my tickets, but the experience was still horribly unacceptable. First of all, she obviously was a trained telemarketer – and her first concern wasn’t helping me, it was ripping as much money out of my wallet as possible, then sucking any other value out of the remainder of my life. Not that I think she was any happier about her script than I was, but that doesn’t make it any better. The first thing she does is sell me the most expense tickets they have – fine, I can understand offering those first, but I had to drag any information about what other tickets they might have out of her. Of course she knows nothing about the seats she’s giving me, and gives me the seats I’ll get and pricing breakdown so fast that I don’t catch any of it. I can understand not knowing anything about the seats, but there was no chance for me to even verify information, ask a question, anything. Ok, fine, Ticketmaster is trying to minimize the time each wallet – excuse me, I mean customer – takes to rip off, but at least pretend like you care!
Now gets to the meat of my problem with Ticketmaster: She proceeds to offer me several confusingly worded possibilities to hang myself with. For example, they’d like to spam me, call me, sell my information… you get the point. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that they didn’t just do all this without even asking, as many unethical companies do (*cough* AOL *cough*). Still, had I not paid close attention, even asking the representative to repeat some of the questions, I would have certainly answered ‘wrong’ (though this would have suited Ticketmaster just fine).
In fact, they spent more time trying to sell me other stuff, or get permission to sell my information, than they did on the $93 I was spending. And to top it off, they wanted an additional $2.50 to email me the tickets, when they print and snail-mail them for free! Wha?!!
Alright, I’m not talented enough to fully convey my rage and anger at the companies involved in this service fiasco. I certainly don’t want to waste any more of your time. Let me sum it up as this: If, in the future, I can at all avoid using Ticketmaster, you can be sure I will (even if this means an extra hour drive to the ticketbooth). If I can’t avoid it, I may well just not go to the event. The Arena at Gwinnett Center still has a chance to redeem itself, but my hopes are not high.
It seems we’re facing an epidemic of poor service and poor quality these days. Make sure your company is not part of the trend. Customers will practically throw money at you, if you can give them the opposite experience.
