 |
| Matty Jacobson is looking out for the consumer. He owns, edits and contributes to The Skewed Review. |
Do NOT spend your money at TicketsPlus.com, MetroEntertainment.com or any vender listed under TicketNetworkDirect.com.
It's pretty rare for me to get so discouraged by a business that I actively seek to decrease its bottom line, and actually, I've only done it just once.
Well, that is, until today.
By the way, both are subsidiaries of the website TicketNetworkDirect.com, so you should probably steer clear of any ticket brokers working under that umbrella company.
If you feel so inclined (and I hope your inclination is a prioritized feeling right now), please click the two links I've provided and familiarize yourself with the two websites. Remember their names and their layout, and be sure to never give them your business. Don't be fooled by their completely different looks and URLs. They are, indeed, the same company. Both companies sell tickets for various events.
Excuse me. Please allow me to clarify. Both companies resell tickets for various events.
The only reason I know this is because of the hell I went through this past weekend trying to recover more than $700 worth of tickets to a show in Salt Lake City.
I am fully aware of ticket brokering. I understand that people get online to purchase tickets, and they'll often use third-party outlets to help them find the best seats for the best prices. If the consumer is aware that he or she is using this method, then it's completely ethical.
However, when someone buys up tickets for the sole purpose of reselling them, we start seeing a blur of the ethical line. Actually, this is a practice known as scalping. According to this Connecticut consumer report, scalping practices are illegal or highly regulated in more than half of the states in America.
Unfortunately, Utah is not one of them. So who will keep the consumer safe if laws will not? Hello. Glad to meet you. My name is Matty, and I'm here to help.
Let me take a moment to remind you of something.
Do NOT spend your money at TicketsPlus.com, MetroEntertainment.com or any vender listed under TicketNetworkDirect.com.
My family and I purchased tickets to the musical "Wicked" in January of this year through TicketsPlus.com. The show was playing in Salt Lake City's Capitol Theatre, and my family and I had just seen Ballet West's rendition of "The Nutcracker" just several weeks prior to purchasing our "Wicked"tickets. I purchased the ballet tickets through Capitol Theatre's own ArtTix.org, and when we didn't receive them in the mail, the good people at ArtTix.org were more than willing to get us replacement tickets and have them waiting for us at will call.
So when we bought our "Wicked" tickets, I assumed if there was any problems, I would at least be safe knowing that replacement tickets could be reprinted.
So here's where everything went wrong.
Somewhere along the way, I was led to believe that this third-party vendor could get me better seats for a "better price." (That was literally what their advertisement read.) I will admit to my own naivety in assuming I was being told the truth. However, that's not a good business practice. Lying to your customers is never a good thing--especially when one of your customers will make it his personal mission to drive away as much business as he can for misleading him.
We ended up paying $97 per ticket plust fees for using the TicketsPlus website. In all, the ticket bill totalled somewhere between $700 and $800. I came to find out later that those same tickets cost $45 to begin with. In addition to that, the tickets weren't even in the seats I had requested. But all that is beside the point.
Three days before the event, we were ticketless. I called Capitol Theatre to have them get our tickets ready to pick up. However, we weren't on file as having purchased tickets at all. So strange. So I contacted TicketsPlus. They redirected me to MetroEntertainment. This is when I found out that the tickets had been purchased by some unknown person who then sold them to MetroEntertainment who then sold them to me.
By the way, there wasn't a dewdrop of empathy or customer service from MetroEntertainment. In fact, the woman on the line seemed annoyed at the very thought of my wanting to ensure that my hundreds of dollars were not wasted.
Well, OK. That's fine. I've dealt with bitches before, and this most certainly wouldn't be the last time. All I needed to know was the name of the person who purchased the tickets so we could have them reprinted. The woman at MetroEntertainment told me that information wasn't available.
So I called Capitol Theatre to tell them my conundrum. The representatives at Capitol Theatre actually went out of their way to find a way to help me out. But in the end, in order to get the tickets, they really needed the name of the purchaser. So I called MetroEntertainment back. The second time I called, I managed to trick the new representative into revealing the seats to me.
Well. This is interesting because the other representative told me they had absolutely no information on these so-called "hard tickets," and that the only option I had was to "purchase more tickets."
So, that's straight-up proof I was lied to from the beginning. But it doesn't end there. In my frustration, I passed along responsibility of tracking down our tickets to my sister. She called the same numbers I called, and this time the representative told her that the company is not allowed to divulge that information or else Capitol Theatre might not sell tickets to them anymore.
Aha. So they do have the information.
In the end, we had to go to Capitol Theatre the day of the event, not even knowing if we would be able to see the show. Luckily, the people at the box office were able to find our tickets because I was able to pull the seat numbers out of representative No. 2. But believe me, it wasn't easy to get that information in the first place.
We were lied to, and our ticket prices were inflated grossly. We were denied access to the very tickets we purchased, and we were treated like dirt in the entire process.
By the way, the websites do include disclaimers that ticket sales are final, so "choose wisely." However, I've yet to find any disclaimers that state, "we will not help you at all if you don't get your tickets," or "we are assholes to our paying customers" or "we will refuse to provide you with options should you lose your tickets" or "we will in no way contact the venue where your event is being held in order to verify that you actually purchased tickets."
Please spread the word.
RECAP: Do NOT spend your money at TicketsPlus.com, MetroEntertainment.com or any vender listed under TicketNetworkDirect.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment