Thoughts by Robert Mignault
I went to see a couple of great shows recently for the Auckland Festival: The Arrival and the Andersen Project. Totally worth seeing. Happy to spend my hard-earned actor bucks to support quality shows coming to town, especially if it’s stuff from Canada (yay! Fellow Cannuck-ans!), and especially if they’re French Cannuck-ans, oui! So fine, shows cost a lot of money to make, and heaps to put on the road. $75 per ticket. I think I can do that.
But let’s take a moment for a little rant about ticketing. I think everybody is quite used to the scramble of ticketing ‘middle-men’ out there who are all to happy to provide you with tickets for a fee. A special jelly-bean goes to those of you out there who can name at least half of the outfits operating in this space… let’s see, there’s Ticketek, iTicket, BuyTickets, The Edge Ticketing Service, MyTickets, SlyTickets, iTix, TicketsOnline, TixMix, FlipBix. So I think you’re all familiar with how this all works…
You call up the ‘free’ 0800 number, so that you can hand over your credit card details over the phone and order your tickets. But wait, that’s not all — to thank you for your custom and your decision to actually buy a ticket, we’ll throw in a little extra for your time: an $8 fee for the privilege of talking to a real human being. (Human being: It’s sort of like those wax people you see at the museum, only they talk a lot more and move. Cool!) Oh, and did I mention that for those 8 bucks, you also get the extra bonus of letting someone else select your ticket? Totally. Basically, you tell them how much money you want to spend, and they’ll decide for you where they think you should sit. Which is a good thing, right? “Your tickets are P48 and P49 in the Circle,” the phone human says. Is that good? Who knows? (And how do you know really that 48-49 aren’t the last seats at the end of the row, off to the side? You don’t. And neither do you know that if you go in the next row back, say row Q, you won’t get centre seats in the next ticket bracket and save 40 bucks? You could go back and forth a little with the operator. But honestly, you’ll have no idea where you’re sitting until you show up for the performance. I’d rather spend my 8 bucks on a latte and a fudge brownie. Now that’s real value! Of course, you could go online and download a seating plan for the ASB Theatre to have handy while your talking to them on the phone — but apart from the fact that that seating plan is not actually easy to find — well, that would involve you going online anyway. Hmmmm. So let’s try the next option.
Online. Wow. We live in such a savvy little digital world. Internet shopping at your fingertips. No human this time. And well, you can’t choose you tickets either. What about an online seating plan that let’s you choose your seats visually from what’s available? Well I know that that’s standard throughout the world, but that would be too difficult to implement. So let the computer decide. Yay Computer! A perfect marriage between science and the arts! This time there’s no way to negotiate. Just give them your money and let some IT person’s algorithm decide which seats the venue hasn’t managed to sell. Oh yes, I almost forgot, 4 bucks please. Cheers!
OK, call me a traditionalist (and yes, you are probably calling me cheap too!) — but there’s only one way to guarantee satisfaction if you care about a) where you sit and b) how much of your money you are
going to hand over: Show up at the damn venue, go to the Box Office and work it out with the venue Staff, just like in the old days. After all, at the heart of this whole showbusiness/audience thing is the venue, right? So the venue wants to sell tickets, right? That’s why they set-up a box office, right? For the benefit of selling tickets to their own shows, right? You’d think.
So on this particular occasion, I drive to the venue a couple of weeks ahead of time so I can get the perfect tickets for The Andersen Project. I’ve been following Robert LePage’s career since the late 80′s and make an effort to see his shows whenever I can, seeing shows in Toronto, Montreal, Las Vegas, Wellington — and now, Auckland.
So far everything about the ticket transaction is going well — I’ve got the box office attendant’s computer screen swiveled around so I can select my own tickets from the seating plan (and yes, I do manage to save $40 bucks by sitting one row back from the original selection). Great. He reads out the total for the tickets I purchased. “Plus the service fee, of two dollars” he says.
How do you figure?
“Well there’s a service fee for selling tickets”
But you ARE the box office, right?
“Right”
And you ARE the venue, right?
“Yes”
So why would you advertise a price for something which you are not intending to sell at that price?
“Huh?”
Right. It’s like going to the dairy to buy a litre of milk, only there’s an extra ‘store fee’ for buying, you guessed it, from a store.
If I can’t buy these tickets from the actual venue for the advertised price, is there anywhere I can buy these tickets for the actual price in the programme?
“Huh? I don’t think so”
Well, well, well. Interesting. Perhaps 2 bucks isn’t that much for an individual to cover. (Well it isn’t really, is it?) But that be a ‘pertee big venue there, cowboy!’ Would you care to multiply that by the number of seats you sell over the course of a couple of seasons?
I say to the staff person: “And how many times do people complain about this?”
“You’re the first.”
Wow. Very Baaaaaaaaad!
Robert Mignault is an Actor with ConArtists