Well it’s that time of year again.
The time when grown men (and women) are driven into a frenzied panic of cursing and swearing. A willingness to stamp all over your friends to get to the front of the electronic queue. What can be causing this? The tiny little fact of a technology meltdown that is the Internet.
No, there isn’t a sudden release of camcorder footage showing Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton and Dame Edna in a lesbian 3 way (not that I know of anyway).
It’s the annual “let’s see how long it takes Spurs’ online ticket system to melt!” competition.
Every year is the same. 9.30am the world and his dog suddenly crawl out of the woodwork and onto their computer to book tickets for the North London Derby.
Before anyone starts thinking this is a rant because I didn’t get a ticket you can stop right there, I’m a season ticket holder. And judging by the reports coming through this forum I’m glad I am.
Now, at the beginning of this season Spurs moved away from Seatbooker to eTicketting. To be honest Seatbooker was a nightmare. It appeared as though it couldn’t handle more than 2 people being logged in at any point in time, so it did need upgrading. Unfortunately from what we’ve encountered so far eTicketting doesn’t seem any different. In fact the whole reason for not only changing systems but also removing peoples’ ability to pick their own seats was officially to speed up the online booking process and minimise the chances of system failures.
To compound this problem a lot of people haven’t even received their membership packs yet so there was vast confusion about their membership/login number to even attempt to buy tickets. People clicking the “Forgotten Password” link often didn’t receive their reminder for hours.
As predicted the system crashed as badly as Seatbooker used to at 10.03am when all you’d get is a nice little screen. “Sorry. The site is currently down for maintenance. Please try back again later.”
We’ve reports of people being in the “queue” just to log in for over an hour. When they finally managed to log in the system was showing “Seats Available” in blocks that when people tried to even book a single seat they were told “not enough seats available”. You could argue that someone else beat them to the available seat but when they returned to the “pick a block” view it was STILL saying “seats available”.
To quote one fan,
”After 2.5 hours spent going backwards and forwards in the queue I have finally got in and there appear to be no tickets available. It says they are available on the stadium view showing as "limited seating available on most blocks" (orange) but when it comes to choosing the number of seats, even for just one ticket it says "There are not enough available seats together to fulfil your request". I have tried this on every available block with the same results What a joke.”
There were multiple reports of people selecting their ticket and going to check out only to find their “basket” empty. Many people found themselves in a never ending loop when they tried to pay for their ticket which meant repeatedly punching in their payment card details. In one case that I know of they needed to be punched in18 times. Numerous people thought they’d got a ticket only for their “session” to be “timed out” which meant they went to the back of the queue again.
The payment section is also flawed in another way. If you don’t enter a “Start Date” in the card details section it won’t let you complete, despite the fact that many cards don’t have one! There also seemed to be major failure with regards to payment confirmation. Often there was no confirmation screen shown or email sent but by looking into the booking history it was sitting there showing “Status = Paid”.
The expected knock on from the failure of the online booking system was obviously a massive surge in the number of people calling the ticket office phone lines. These were as good as ever too. Several people have commented about being in the queue and suddenly getting disconnected. This actually happened to me a few weeks ago when I called up for tickets for the Leyton Orient and Torino games. Started at “queue position 17” and got all the way to “queue position 2” after being on hold for best part of 20 minutes and the line cut off.
The thing is that it isn’t just because it was Arsenal! The system also apparently crashed when the tickets went on sale for both Everton and Derby too.
I know this shows that we’re a popular team and desperately need a bigger stadium but come on Spurs, sort it out!
You don’t need to be an IT wizard to realise whatever computer software they’re using isn’t really the problem. The problem appears to be the hardware isn’t powerful enough to cope!
One way to phase the booking tidal wave could be to introduce staggered booking in the same way as Reading do for their Platinum games. They stagger their on sale dates so members with the highest loyalty, they call them Royalty, points get a head start. For example below is the online on sale dates taken from the Reading website for their home match against Everton.
171 points + - Sat 21st July
161 - 170 = Mon 23rd July
151 - 160 = Tue 24th July
Etc all the way down to any member on Tue 7th Aug
Now people will moan about “How are occasional visitors going to get a ticket?” Simple. Go to more “unattractive” games and build up your loyalty points. Loyalty points are already in place for away tickets. Isn’t it time we used them for the premium home games too?