Abba Zabba

I hate Ticketmaster.

Their website just doesn't work. At least, not when I really want it to. Friday night I bought tickets for a show that wasn't close to sold out, and I had no problems. The site is fine for situations like that. But just now, I tried to buy tickets for a show that I knew would sell out, and the site completely failed me.

First, the tickets were supposed to go on sale on Saturday morning. At some point that was moved to Monday morning. So instead of buying from home, I was forced to do it from work. At least our web-blocking software doesn't block Ticketmaster.com. But it's still possible that the firewall caused some of my problems. Or it could just be Ticketmaster's incompetence.

The way the site works, you choose what type of tickets you want, then enter a queue. When your wait is over, you're presented with tickets, and you can buy them or search again. In theory. The way it actually works, the first few times your wait is over, you get an "Invalid request. Sorry for the inconvenience." error, and have to start waiting again. Do that a few times, and you can instead get the "No tickets found" error. They never tell you the show is sold out; they tell you they can't find tickets that you requested, and suggest you broaden the request. At least if they said "Sold Out" I'd stop trying.

After 15 minutes of reloading with multiple browsers, I finally got the search to complete. I was offered the worst seats in the house, for the second night of the show, which I don't even want to go to. As far as I can tell, both shows sold out in under 20 minutes. And even though I started the ticket search process within a minute of tickets going on sale, I was only offered the worst seats possible. And that's why Ticketmaster sucks. Now, off to Ebay!