Software put in place earlier this year created new problems for SCOPE’s ticket process last Thursday, as students complained of several issues. All of the problems occurred when the ticket website received extremely high traffic. This, combined with impatient students, led to a number of problems that left a small number of people ticketless.
Complaints could be seen on social media as students spoke their minds on the University of New Hampshire (UNH) Class of 2018 Facebook group.
“I got charged for tickets I didn’t even get,” said Alex Teuber, who relayed the complaint via Facebook.
“I sent them a quick email and they were able to fix it within the day! Definitely a hassle, but I’m happy that it was an easy fix once I noticed,” said Rosie Muise in a Facebook post.
For Kyle Hughes, the website was going extremely slow. He kept clicking purchase until it finally went through. “I looked at my statement and I got charged nine times for one ticket,” said Hughes, a UNH sophomore.
Luckily for Hughes and some other students, their problems were resolved rather quickly. “It wasn’t a huge deal, all the money was refunded within 12 hours,” noted Hughes.
The show sold out in just 5 hours and 30 minutes, setting a new record according to SCOPE’s Twitter and Facebook accounts.
“There were so many people on the site at the same time, that it was taking a really long time for transactions to go to their bank for approval and come back to the system,” said Julia Pond, the financial support specialist and overseer of the MUB ticket office.
If you were of the old-fashioned variety and wanted to line up at the MUB ticket office, you were one of a few.
As the tickets began selling at 8 a.m., the problems followed shortly after.
“The vast majority of the tickets were sold online. My staff sold five non-student floor tickets, everything else was bought online,” said Pond.
“Everyone that had an issue, those transactions were taking place around 8:02-8:05 a.m.,” added Pond. “If you were the first eight people in line, three of you got floor tickets for your friends, that’s it.”
Pond says that being in the first year of this ticket transaction system has seen its ups and downs, “The first time we had issues [was with Kygo], we knew we had issues, and we fixed all of them. This was a new situation,” Pond said as she explained what happened to the website’s most recent ticket sales.
“Usually that’s fine because usually it means a credit card is bad or wrong and that’s a really great way to prevent bad credit cards. All of the traffic to the site was slowing it down. This system got an error message, that happened to approximately 80 people,” Pond said.
Of those 80 people that had problems with the website, only 10 found themselves ticketless. Not a bad statistic when you compare them to the 4,158 people that bought tickets online.
Students have been advised to remain patient for a few more weeks, as the concert is scheduled for April 29.
If Pond has any advice for any prospective online ticket buyers, it’s to be patient.
“Patience is hard, it’s really hard. If you are patient, it will work great,” she said.
