Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Ticketmaster Disaster

Well I still have my cold or whatever it is. It does seem to be better today. My throat is no longer sore, but my head is still full.

I didnt' blog about my ticketmaster disaster when it happened because I thought I needed to calm down a bit and get a more distant perspective of everything. So here goes. You can quit reading here and I won't be offended.

On March 31, I received an email from Sara asking me to please go online on April 1st and make the purchase of her Ohio State football tickets for the the 2009 season. She had classes all day from 7 am til 4:30 pm. Not hard, I had done it before. This year, however, OSU ticket processing was going thru Ticketmaster. So at 10 am I logged onto ticketmaster. Forty five minutes later I am still getting the message " Your wait is 15 minutes or less". So I wait, and wait, and wait. I was finally assigned the tickets. It took me three tries to get the site to actually offer the "Student" tickets. When I go to the history of the tickets purchased, the price doesn't seem right. It's $10 more than it should be. Seriously, they should have paid me the $10 for the inconvenience. I call Sara and tell her she is sitting in "Block O" section. Not good, she doesn't want in Block O, I didn't request Block O and that's why my price was higher. So I call Ticketmaster. Forty five minutes later I am speaking to an actual person. She tells me there is nothing that can be done about it. I call Sara and tell her, she's said don't worry about it. An hour later I get a call from Sara that all her friends are getting regular tickets (not Block O), and why didn't she get them. Ugg. So you guessed it, I called Ticketmaster. This time I get a wonderful woman who has agreed to help me. After an hour and a half and killing the battery on two remote phones, she does get the Block O designation off and it looks like we are in the clear with regular reserve seating. I actually promised to name my first grandchild after her (Katie) if she can get all this mess fixed for me. Sure hope the first one is a girl! So I'm thinking we are done. WRONG.....my credit card bill shows up about 6 days later. Not only is the charge for OSU tickets on my statement, but two other charges for OSU tickets for $320.00. Once again, Ticketmaster, here I come. Yep, forty five minutes later, I am talking to a supervisor who explains to me that they have only run my credit card once, not three times. His advice at this point is to dispute the charges. I did, and we are waiting to see what's going to happen. The credit card company said that the two charges that I say I didn't make were made at a ticketmaster location in Indiana face to face. Yeah, I went there two minutes after my original purchase with ticketmaster. Heck I was still on the phone with them when the other two were made. Today we received two new credit cards in the mail. The reason they gave is because of possible fraudulent use of our card.....Do You Think?????

I didn't give Ticketmaster a very good review when I talked to the OSU Athletic department. I don't understand why TM wasn't prepared for the onslot of 50,000 students all trying to get their tickets at the same time. I'm hoping they make some big changes in the way the students get their tickets in 2010. Next time, Sara can call and get her own tickets! I wasted about six hours total on the phone with TM, CC company, OSU Athlete office.

Wow, that was long, sorry. If anyone can top my TM disaster, I'll send you a fat quarter.

Ok, I'm done.

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