Mis-sold event tickets?

meer53

If you had no choice of seating and booked the tickets on that basis i don't think you will get very far with your complaint.

macman

Assuming your tickets were not collected at the venue, did you not look at the seat numbers beforehand? If so, surely you would have deduced that 'row 73' was not going to be a trackside seat?
Why didn't you just move to empty seats with a better view? The worst that could happen is that you were asked to move back again, though highly unlikely if you weren't in a seat already sold to someone else.
The reason you left early is that you failed to allow enough time to exit the stadium when planning your return journey: that is no fault of the ticket seller or the venue.

Manxman_in_exile

Fosterdog wrote: »

Personally I don't think you have a claim for a full refund as you did stay for the event, so as already mentioned a refund of the difference between what it should have cost for those seats and what it did actually cost. If the refund of one ticket at £95 is more than that difference they are already being generous. Thank you. I tend to agree but my wife doesn't. We wouldn't have bothered spending four hours on the round journey that day if we'd known where the seats were located.

If the £95 is less than the difference then write back and ask for more. No more two page letters, they are just full of emotional bumph that is neither relevant nor easy to read. Keep it short, simple and to the point. As an example:

On x date we purchased y tickets for event z at a cost of £95 each. Tickets were promised to be in blocks a, b, c, d, or e based on the ticket value and priority booking. Tickets were actually for block n where the prices are only £x per ticket. I will give you 14 days to refund the difference between the two amounts or will seek to claim the money back through court.

That is all that is needed, anything that dragged that simple paragraph out onto two pages is ridiculous, it probably wasn't fully read and if it was it was then just passed around the office for everyone to mock you.

I can understand how frustrating this must have been but for your wife to still be upset and to have cried through the whole event is a little bit hysterical and not really a normal reaction. You both may have enjoyed the event more if she had engaged with it and made an effort. I may have exaggerated a little...:rotfl:

I don't know what the event is, I dont really watch TV so even if this is something that has been widely reported on it has passed me by unless its the athletics which even I have caught snippets of. I know these big stadium events can be hugely expensive even for "bad" seats. We didn't consider the seats expensive. Problem was the seats allocated weren't the ones w bought

Thanks. That's helpful.

Manxman_in_exile

StaffieTerrier wrote: »

Out of interest, did you pay the same amount for each session? I went to a large sporting event recently. We paid £50 each for very good tickets in one session but in the session after ours the same seats were £125 each.

Have you since checked the pricing and seat areas of allocation for that particular session? When we bought our tickets I looked carefully at the seating layout. The category of ticket we bought had 3 areas of seating. Two areas were really close to the front and the other high up in the top of the arena. We were lucky getting seats closer to the front.

The sessions we booked all had the same pricing structure. (Five different price categories). Later sessions were more expensive.


Yes I did check the seating layout (ticket seating plan) before buying the tickets, so I understood where we were likely to be seated. The problem is that the position of the seats allocated did not correspond with the published seating plan. I would not have chosen to buy the tickets we were allocated. We would not have bothered going.


Out of interest, which sporting event did you attend, if you don't mind me asking?

Keep_pedalling

Manxman_in_exile wrote: »

The sessions we booked all had the same pricing structure. (Five different price categories).

Out of interest, which sporting event did you attend, if you don't mind me asking?

I thought we were supposed to guess!

Manxman_in_exile

meer53 wrote: »

If you had no choice of seating and booked the tickets on that basis i don't think you will get very far with your complaint.

It's correct that we didn't have a choice of specific seats. But I did base my decision to purchase the price category I did on the published ticket seating plan. This shows the stadium divided into different sections corresponding to the different price categories. I would have accepted any tickets allocated to us on the basis of that seating plan. If I had known beforehand that the third session tickets were going to be so far "off" the seating plan, I would not have bought them.

Manxman_in_exile

Keep_pedalling wrote: »

I thought we were supposed to guess!

I'm guessing it's the same one! I know, I'm being cheeky asking someone else while keeping my own cards to my chest...

Manxman_in_exile

macman wrote: »

Assuming your tickets were not collected at the venue, did you not look at the seat numbers beforehand? If so, surely you would have deduced that 'row 73' was not going to be a trackside seat? Point taken. The category tickets we bought were not all situated towards the front of the stadium. They extended back to about half-way up the stadium. Not knowing the total number of rows in the stadium we assumed that the tickets allocated must be right at the back of our price category, according to the ticket seating plan (Nb - the seating plan did not show row numbers.) As it turned out we were wrong and there were only 73 rows in our part of the stadium.

Why didn't you just move to empty seats with a better view? The worst that could happen is that you were asked to move back again, though highly unlikely if you weren't in a seat already sold to someone else. Yes - we could have moved seats as there empty seats around us. But all the empty seats around us had the same viewing conditions. This was a popular and well-attended event and part of the complaint is that these were not the "priority Allocation" seats we bought as so many around us were unsold!

The reason you left early is that you failed to allow enough time to exit the stadium when planning your return journey: that is no fault of the ticket seller or the venue. Sort of... I'm actually quite careful about this sort of thing and I was confident when planning the return journey that we had adequate time to reach the station - based on the tickets we thought we had bought. We did have a contingency plan but that would mean arriving home at 2am and buying additional train tickets. When in the stadium, looking at 10s of thousands of spectators and realising that we were right at the very back of the stand and would likely be the among the last people leaving the stadium, we decided to leave early to avoid the crush. This was also partly based on our experience of the two previous sessions when we were able to leave the stadium immediately. The problem with the third session was the location of the seats - which wecould not have anticipated.

Thanks. I understand the points you make.

Manxman_in_exile

Keep_pedalling wrote: »

I thought we were supposed to guess!

Actually there's no need to guess, although I think warehouse may have done.
(EDIT: I think macman may have guessed too)


I've just realised it's all revealed on the public transport board.

StaffieTerrier

Manxman_in_exile wrote: »

I'm guessing it's the same one! I know, I'm being cheeky asking someone else while keeping my own cards to my chest...

Then I'm not going to say either

As soon as I got our tickets I looked at seating plans for the venue. The event didn't have a full seating plan but there's plenty of other websites that do. We managed to workout to within a couple of seats where we'd be sitting.