Is Ticketek cooked ?

[Meg]

Here’s the full story for the record:

Club members – Wednesday, August 29

11am - Richmond v Hawthorn
1pm - Melbourne v Geelong
3pm - Sydney v GWS Giants

The club member purchase window remains open and exclusive for 24 hours.

AFL members – Thursday, August 30

9am - Richmond v Hawthorn
9am - Melbourne v Geelong

General public – Thursday, August 30

1.30pm - Richmond v Hawthorn
2.30pm - Melbourne v Geelong
4pm - Sydney Swans v GWS Giants

[Hotpotato]

So when can I buy some non member for two daughters, Thursday at 4.00pm?

[Meg]

So when can I buy some non member for two daughters, Thursday at 4.00pm?

Yes, assuming still available (which others seem confident will still be the case for the SCG match).

[jono2707]

So I hope/assume that the 4 x tickets that I apparently purchased this morning will remain valid? I haven't had a confirmation email from Ticketek yet but managed to get the PDFs via the website (eventually) this morning.

[Meg]

So I hope/assume that the 4 x tickets that I apparently purchased this morning will remain valid? I haven't had a confirmation email from Ticketek yet but managed to get the PDFs via the website (eventually) this morning.

From AFL site:

Q. What if I purchased tickets this morning?
A. They are still valid.

The infuriating thing is, had they staggered the sales in the first place (as they should have done) we should not have had problems for the SCG. Trouble was we were competing with the ‘000s of members of the four Vic clubs trying to get online at the same time.

Below are Aug 2018 memberships for all relevant clubs. No idea, but perhaps half trying to buy tickets = 180,000? 150,000?

Richmond 100,000
Hawthorn 80,000
Melbourne 44,000
Geelong 64,000
Swans 61,000
GWS 25,000

Total 374,000

[Meg]

Very small consolation but: “TRANSACTION FEE WAIVED
Club Members will not be charged the Ticketek transaction fee of $7.25 for Week 1 Finals games at the SCG”

[ugg]

Does that mean they will refund the members who have successfully purchased this morning?

[Meg]

Does that mean they will refund the members who have successfully purchased this morning?

Unclear, I suspect not (hey, you should be grateful for your extreme good luck!) but maybe they will - the bad PR for AFL is causing them to put a lot of pressure on Ticketek.

[ugg]

Yep fair call. Just wondering.

[erica]

Does that mean they will refund the members who have successfully purchased this morning?

According to Ticketek on Twitter, the transaction fee is waived for tickets for Finals week 1 bought from Wednesday.

[Beerman]

Honestly, Ticketek are worse finals performers than Leon Davis. Their site is less stable than RWO. And yet companies persist in using them. It's a mystery.

I don't understand how it is so hard. These days with elastic compute and similar services it's not that hard to scale up hardware to handle events like this. I suspect they don't have a scalable mid-tier or database and fixing it would mean a massive rewrite. Even so, it's not like they haven't had problems every other year. They should have planned for this and let the AFL know that their approach was not going to be workable.

[Meg]

I bought a good ticket today in the Brewongle. No hassle getting into the site but I had to have three goes to get a seat I was happy with. I kept clicking on the Brewongle and the ‘system’ kept offering me a seat low down in the O’ Reilly!

No service charge (as promised yesterday after the shambles) though there seemed to be a compulsory charity donation for which the default setting was $50 (which I thought was cheeky). I reset it to $5.

Perhaps there was a way to untick this box and pay nothing but with the clock ticking down I didn’t spend long looking. The last thing I wanted after at last getting a good ticket was for the system to time me out before I had completed payment.

Hope everyone else got/gets satisfactory tickets.

Now I hope the Swans reward us for all this effort! Go Swannies!

[Hotpotato]

Amazon would nail ticketing, they will soon be into banking and everything else.

Had no issues however getting my tik in Brewongle, now just need a couple for 2 daughters anywhere.

[AnnieH]

Thought RWO must have attached itself to Ticketek yesterday... stop going down - it's finals time!!!

How did everyone go getting tickets?
Are we all happy?

[Meg]

Just read that the release of tickets to the remaining finals from now on will be staggered. That is such a ‘no brainer’. We’ve been telling them to do that for years.