Ticket Chaos Tonight (the after)

[clapham_gull]

Wasn't able to make it tonight, but it seems to be a bit like Victoria station on a Saturday - which I experience every home game.

Able to cope with it most of the time, but when the sun comes out everyone seems to get out of the city and the ticket machines and booths are swamped.

It's probably easy to resolve and the club could take "a ticket" out of Victoria Stations book, where staff with those portable ticket machines will suddenly appear on the concourse.

So distribute bunches of tickets (alphabetically) amoungst stewards or other staff who have been trained to distribute tickets (ask for address for confirmation etc...)

Have some alpabetical bibs made up for the staff to wear.

We are English and very good at forming orderly queues.

Easy - no need for extra ticket staff, just train a few who can step out for a half hour when needed.

 

[Djmiles]

Offering a discount for another game or something similar to all those the club obviously still have undistributed collection tickets would also be a good gesture in the circumstances.

We didn't even get an apology when we were left outside for 15 mins against Ipswich, so the chances of people getting compensated is slim to none....correction, NONE

 

[bright1064]

I have to say that the fiasco tonight cannot be excused. Why should anyone pay money to endure that kind of fiasco? The club need to sort this out, and fast!

 

[Mr Burns]

This is a total and utter shambles and to be honest someone needs to lose there job over this.

Dick Knight must be a very embarrased man tonight. He sacked the old manager basically because gates were down, and he thought Micky Adams would draw in more fans.

So, for the first home game of the season, people are giving up on the phone during the day because its taking to long to order a ticket, and wait for it............

you can still at this precise second go to the clubs website, and the ticket Homepage does still not have a link to buy a tickets saturdays home game, although you can buy one for the match away at Southend the following week!

Does this club want to sell tickets??

Come on, if were going to sack a manager to basically increase sells and take the club forward, at least have the staff in place to sell and deliver the tickets.

Dick Knight's next sacking should be whoever is in charge of the tickets sells!!

 

[clapham_gull]

You and Doug Deep's comments are naive mate (this is not a personal attack by the way).

Should have read my later post then, I hadn't read the full thread and was unaware of the circumstances

My solution above, works at Victoria station which seems to also suffer from an "elastic demand" for tickets.

 

[Horton's halftime iceberg]

Considering they are selling tickets on the gate too.....(see my Ask the Club thread)

I think he was making reference to phone and internet bookings, someone said don't you use computors.

Selling tickets on the gate is against the rules laid down by the council in agreeing the terms of using the Withdean. If you saw money being paid then that puts the club at risk.

I hope the club get away with this tonight on both health and safety terms and a PR exercise on floating fans who may not return.

 

[Couldn't Be Hyypia]

you can still at this precise second go to the clubs website, and the ticket Homepage does still not have a link to buy a tickets saturdays home game, although you can buy one for the match away at Southend the following week!

Does this club want to sell tickets??

Errr....I went to the club site and clicked "By Tickets" and went straight to a link to buy two tickets. How is this a problem?

 

[Tooting Gull]

Apart from anything else, the shambles deflects from what sounded a very good performance. The headlines should have been about the game, instead they will be about piss-poor ticketing arrangements. The Albion celebrate the Glorious 12th by...you've guessed it...shooting themselves with both barrels in the foot.

 

[Mendoza]

The club are keen to advertise that you can buy tickets upto 30 mins before kick off so they should at least be able to provide the service that people are paying for.

That is true, but the fans take as much of the blame as the club.
I said I know its a joke and unfortunate this has happened, especially after Ipswich, but if people tun up 15 minutes before the game expecting to get their ticket before kick off then, they are expecting a lot.

I still think that having numerous points to collect your tickets will cause just as much confusion. A scene, where someone has queued for 10 minutes in the wrong queue, and wont get to the back of the right queue, to wait inline for another 10 minutes.

Im not saying it should be left as it is, but improvement there should be.

I walked to the ground about 7.35 and peoples jaws were dropping when they saw the queue and knew they needed to get to the back of it.

Todays fiasco was probably down to the fact that every ticket was up for sale, and season ticket holders were queueing for tickets as well as casual ticket buyers, and the problems just kept esculating

 

[Easy 10]

I will be back but I am really peed off when we have won 4-0 due to terrible oragnisation.

That Barnet defence did sound pretty piss poor.

 

[1234andcounting]

Perhaps I have missed something, but I thought the primary business purpose of Brighton and Hove Albion FC was to play football in front of paying spectators. Most sensibly run organisations go through planning scenarios to work out how they will deal with different situations. This cannot cover all scenarios but it does imbue a sense of how to deal with such situations. Tonight, it was absolutely clear that there was no-one at the ground with the requisite leadership skills to deal with what was, after all, a minor administrative hiccup (although a complete public relations fiasco).

What aggravated me even more once inside the North Stand was the complete and utter lack of interest in my views as a disgruntled customer shown by two relatively senior members of staff (Martin Perry and Paul Rogers).

I am a 10 year season ticket holder and, as part of the package, we were guaranteed free tickets for all home cup games. For Round 1 LC matches when we have been drawn at home, the ticket has always been included in the season ticket package. Mine arrived on Saturday, without the ticket for tonight's match, leaving me little time to do anything much about it other than phone first thing on Monday morning, and my only option (not living in Brighton) was to collect the ticket on the night of the match. (For those posters who think that it should be possible to get there at least 30 mins before the kick-off, we don't all live in Brighton). Even so, I was there by 7.25pm which should have been ample time to distribute the tickets.

I have never, in all 40plus years of following the Albion, been so pissed off with the incompetence as was shown tonight. This was entirely avoidable and Martin Perry's inability to deal with two rightly pissed off ten year season ticket holders just put the tin lid on it as far as I am concerned.

 

[Mr Burns]

Errr....I went to the club site and clicked "By Tickets" and went straight to a link to buy two tickets. How is this a problem?

If you go to the ticket Homepage (which is where you end up if you click on the tickets tab), there is a link to buy tickets at Southend, and not Satrudays game.

Believe me, a lot of internet users would go to the ticket homepage and if they can't link from there give up. Most on this board would be savy enough to follow other links, but a casual internet user, would probaly start at the ticket homepage, and go no further.

 

[southstandandy]

Mike Ward made a good point on the phone in tonight about how amateurish the whole ticket set up is, with a message saying you could order Crewe tickets on the Monday after the match on the ticket phone line!

I ordered my Bristol Rovers ticket a week ago and had no problem ordering it by phone, but it only arrived this morning after being hand delivered by a very kind lady in Southwick (I live in Shoreham). Put simply my address had been hand written on the envelope in writing that was so poor and unclear my six year old nephew could have written it better - no wonder it got delivered to the wrong address and town !

I was going to phone up and query where the ticket was today but to my surprise this lady who lived in a similar road in Southwick actually knocked on my door as she was in Shoreham this afternoon and asked if the envelope was mine !

I have an account at the club on the system, so why couldn't a basic sticky label be run off with my address to prevent any miss-writing of addresses or for the postmen to miss-read ineligble handwriting.

I accept its easy to say we should all get season tickets or arrange for our tickets to be sent days in advance of a match, but there is still a large percentage of people who will always want to get their tickets late in the day based on the weather, other commitments etc, and the club cannot afford to lose the faith of this valuable market - fairweather supporters or not.

Something has to be done - I hope the club make a statement in the light of tonights fiasco regarding :
a) not delaying kick off
b) not having more people to distribute tickets knowing that for a match that nobody had a season ticket for was inevitably going to see a fair number of people collecting their tickets on the night.

 

[Horton's halftime iceberg]

That is true, but the fans take as much of the blame as the club.
I said I know its a joke and unfortunate this has happened, especially after Ipswich, but if people tun up 15 minutes before the game expecting to get their ticket before kick off then, they are expecting a lot.

I still think that having numerous points to collect your tickets will cause just as much confusion. A scene, where someone has queued for 10 minutes in the wrong queue, and wont get to the back of the right queue, to wait inline for another 10 minutes.

Im not saying it should be left as it is, but improvement there should be.

I walked to the ground about 7.35 and peoples jaws were dropping when they saw the queue and knew they needed to get to the back of it.

Todays fiasco was probably down to the fact that every ticket was up for sale, and season ticket holders were queueing for tickets as well as casual ticket buyers, and the problems just kept esculating

If the gates had not have been opened tonight, I do not believe they would have got everyone in until after half time.

The club should have realised they had 500 plus tickets that need collecting by peoples names.

You saw a problem at 7.35, why did the 6 police and 6 stewards not do anything.

I will be back but it would definatly put of the casual fan.

 

[Bozza]

I think he was making reference to phone and internet bookings, someone said don't you use computors.

I don't think he was, I've posted about it before - people pay cash at the ticket office to buy tickets that have not been pre-ordered.

 

[Conkers]

Selling tickets on the gate is against the rules laid down by the council in agreeing the terms of using the Withdean. If you saw money being paid then that puts the club at risk.

Indeed it does, that is why I thought it necessary to make Insider aware of this. And icing on the cake, these two people who paid on the gate didn't even pay a booking fee. So the general rule is.....don't buy on the internet, don't buy over the phone, get down to the ground instead and pay on the gate. Save yourself a few quid in the process

 

[Horton's halftime iceberg]

Perhaps I have missed something, but I thought the primary business purpose of Brighton and Hove Albion FC was to play football in front of paying spectators. Most sensibly run organisations go through planning scenarios to work out how they will deal with different situations. This cannot cover all scenarios but it does imbue a sense of how to deal with such situations. Tonight, it was absolutely clear that there was no-one at the ground with the requisite leadership skills to deal with what was, after all, a minor administrative hiccup (although a complete public relations fiasco).

What aggravated me even more once inside the North Stand was the complete and utter lack of interest in my views as a disgruntled customer shown by two relatively senior members of staff (Martin Perry and Paul Rogers).

I am a 10 year season ticket holder and, as part of the package, we were guaranteed free tickets for all home cup games. For Round 1 LC matches when we have been drawn at home, the ticket has always been included in the season ticket package. Mine arrived on Saturday, without the ticket for tonight's match, leaving me little time to do anything much about it other than phone first thing on Monday morning, and my only option (not living in Brighton) was to collect the ticket on the night of the match. (For those posters who think that it should be possible to get there at least 30 mins before the kick-off, we don't all live in Brighton). Even so, I was there by 7.25pm which should have been ample time to distribute the tickets.

I have never, in all 40plus years of following the Albion, been so pissed off with the incompetence as was shown tonight. This was entirely avoidable and Martin Perry's inability to deal with two rightly pissed off ten year season ticket holders just put the tin lid on it as far as I am concerned.

I am with you, STH and not happy with the clubs management tonight

 

[British Bulldog]

That is true, but the fans take as much of the blame as the club.
I said I know its a joke and unfortunate this has happened, especially after Ipswich, but if people tun up 15 minutes before the game expecting to get their ticket before kick off then, they are expecting a lot.

I still think that having numerous points to collect your tickets will cause just as much confusion. A scene, where someone has queued for 10 minutes in the wrong queue, and wont get to the back of the right queue, to wait inline for another 10 minutes.

Im not saying it should be left as it is, but improvement there should be.

I walked to the ground about 7.35 and peoples jaws were dropping when they saw the queue and knew they needed to get to the back of it.

Todays fiasco was probably down to the fact that every ticket was up for sale, and season ticket holders were queueing for tickets as well as casual ticket buyers, and the problems just kept esculating

If the club cant cope with 2571 paying fans then what hope have we got when we get to Falmer?

 

[Horton's halftime iceberg]

That Barnet defence did sound pretty piss poor.

 

[liam82]

the rest of the crowd managed to turn up in time why the f*** couldn't they just get there earlier or get their tickets sooner. Always the clubs fault when dumbasses can't organise themselves!

Maybe some people like me did not finish work in crawley until 7pm.
I would think anyone that ordered a ticket after Thursady would have had to pick it up today.

The club keeps advertising you can buy tickets up to half hour before the game.
But what are we saying thats ok but if more than 200 people do it your F**KED ?

dont think so

plainly a better system is needed, I'm not going to moan about the club, they will realise after toady they will need to work on an alternative.