Take That...am I being unreasonable to think that....

[baffledmum]

....the ticket agencies should have been able to cope with the demand? Surely, if you are offereing over a million seats for sale and you create that sort of PR storm ahead of the selling time you sort of know what to expect?

Timing it for the post-school run was also an act of sheer genuis!

I'm so glad I'm not a Take That fan! Never in my life have I heard so many people talking about the same pop band in one day.

You're not being unreasonable, I don't think. It would make sense for them to have prepared. But I guess there's a limit to how much the company could do about it.

Did you get a ticket?

Yes!!!!!!! !
Agree it was completely ridiculous.

Well I know someone who works for one of the ticket
companies, who spent months preparing. It is a
massive massive build up and extreme demand, and he had to work extremely hard on it. And where ticketmaster crashed, his site didn't, so perhaps the moral of the story is to use smaller independent ticket companies?

Which site does he work for River? I (and lots of other people) were trying all the authorised ticket companies but all the sites were crashing.

every main site crashed repeatedly all day - you would think they would be able to prevent this - its not like they didnt know how big the demand would be.

Perhaps River he should get advertising a bit more ! He would have got a load of business from mumsnet

tbf they sold over a million tickets. They tried to prepare for worst case scenario but it was worse than they were expecting.

And chill out, it's only music fgs.

haha well dp whose company offer solutions to this kind of thing reckons it's all a ploy

he says it's beyond easy to make their systems able to cope with the demand. and they could also do it on an ad-hoc basis, so it isn;'t a case of having to have it set up for high demand constantly even though it isn't usuaully that bad

they KNOW when they have high demand tickets coming out and there is nothing stopping them from preventing the sites crashing

so he thinks it's just a ploy. they WANT it to crash to create more hysteria and get fans desperately trying to get tickets. I know a few people who now have more tickets than they need because they asked friends to try on their behalf....

Thisis yesterday - totally agree! They wanted a feeding frenzy and the headlines!

Mind you, I was some how extremely jammy and got tickets within half an hour of trying mid afternoon- no idea how, i wasn't put in a queue?!

What frustrates me is the touts - professional and the opportunists on eBay :( that is easily avoided too.

It was absolutely ridiculous! "Unprecedented demand"

Also irritates me about ebay by 9:15 there were loads of tickets on there.

they have no interest in sorting the problem. It's the same when trying to buy Glastonbury tickets and has been for at least 6 years now. Every year there are lots of complaints and they never do anything to fix it.

Whilst I agree it was frustrating to be refreshing the screen all day, I think in the end it worked out much better

These things often sell out within 1-2 hours, having it so many people couldn't get through/online meant it took a lot longer to sell the tickets. Most people I know were able to get tickets in the end

Seems to me, to have worked well to be able to buy over the course of the day, instead of just the one hour

Don't any of you WORK?? How did everyone have the time to spend all day trying to get hold of tickets?

There is never any point in getting caught up in the hysteria of trying to buy tickets for a big event when they first go on sale...the promoters ALWAYS release new dates and new ticket batches further down the line.

DH works for one of the ticket companies - like River's friend, they spent months preparing for the excessive demand and their site didn't crash once (same site River?!).

Believe me, if the site goes down they lose thousands and thousands of sales and credibility so I don't believe for a minute it's a deliberate ploy.

I was trying to do it sneakily at work yesterday with no luck but my friend got us tickets through her company's corporate entertainment company. That appears to be where a lot of tickets have gone. £80 and I don't even want Robbie Williams on but it was a fantastic show last time.

Actually Nancy. It is true I was ready at 9am for my Screamadelica tickets (one night only) Primal Scream, got them it sold out, new date put on and now they are doing a whole tour so I need not have travelled to London and could have seen them more locally. Mind you looking forward to a girly weekend in London in a couple of weeks.

verity: "Last year at ticketline office they were infront of me with at least 12 others and bought 8 tickets for each venue each."

See, that's a message to anybody that they were touts! It's fair enough for them to think, "We won't ask for photo ID or add any unnecessary complications" because I suppose that presents a problem in itself (e.g. buying it for a friend who decides not to come) but if someone comes in and orders a very large handful of tickets for every venue... well... I swear some companies don't even care as long as they get the money.

But surely they are, in effect, helping criminal activity by selling to blatant touts? Touting is illegal, right?

Threads like this make me so glad I don't care about Take That. I've been in a rush to get other tickets (most memorably Foo Fighters at Wembley Stadium), but it wasn't as manic as this sounds. Absolute bloody madness. And totally unnecessary.

Staranise maybe it is but I don't want to out
myself on here. Would you delete anise and add a colour perhaps?

And yes, apparently if their site crashes they have to allow someone else to sell their ticket allocation, so they don't let them crash on purpose.

Looking at all of the tickets for sale at ridiculous prices on ebay , do any of the selling agencies take action against these touts?

Surely it's not beyond their means to offer to buy them, find out the details of the seating and then cancel them? (Baffledmum pauses and realises that there is a job there...) If this was the Olympics there'd be uproar!

Clam - it is half term here and I work in a school, so no work. Perfect timing for me fortunately.

Ther ticket agencies know they don't have to provide extra servers, etc. as they know the demand is there and people will keep trying. They don't have to care about customer service as they know people won't be able to contact them about it on the day anyway.

Clam - me too - although I was on holiday and used a WiFi connection. [hsmile]

Is anyone going to spill which independent ticketing agency it was? Am happy to use an independent but had no idea you could get them from anywhere other than the 4 named in the advert.