Even after our extensive testing and probing of the ticketing system last year, here at Ticketlab we were unable to get the number of Tickets we wanted for Glastonbury Festival 2014 in the sale on Sunday.
The reason we didn’t manage to get tickets is due to a few minor changes on See’s part. The Glastonbury Ticket Tips we shared last year, as well as the overall user flow remained the same, however the system was far less prone to timeouts and connection failures than previously (although there was still an abundance of those!).
This meant that having a faster connection or multiple browsers/tabs open didn’t give you the leg-up that you got last year – you’d be as likely to hit the “queueing” page as anyone else and the page was refreshing almost as soon as you hit F5, so you saved no time or got any extra requests out of having more tabs. Whether See Tickets upped the capacity of the actual booking servers we don’t know, but they were certainly better able to tell people the were being held in a queue.
There were another two factors that didn’t aid us in our ticketing quest: the pre-sale of coach tickets on the Thursday (meaning reduced capacity by 12,000 up for grabs on the Sunday) and the limit you can buy being brought down to 6 from 8.
As before, organisation (i.e. a good old-fashioned spreadsheet) is vital. The more people you have trying the more likely someone will get through to get tickets: we were organised into groups of 4-6 people each responsible for looking out for themselves before trying for the next group in the spreadsheet. We had four groups. All but one group (my group) got tickets. If the ticket limit was still 8 we’d definitely be going.
After 1 hour and 20 minutes we’d managed to enter payment details for our group, but the announcement came up on all our friends’ screens that the ticket deposits were sold out, and that session was invalidated and the process cancelled. So close!
What will we do now? Well, wait for the resale in April of course! We’ve got 20 friends already with tickets offering to sit on their computers to help out. After all, what is a festival without friends?
Should we still fail even then? I think I might spend my week off on white sandy beaches instead and hope it rains for everyone else at Glastonbury 2014.
See may have performed better this year, but we’re not letting them off the hook for being evil just yet – they posted this sarcastic remark to their Facebook followers after so many were left disappointed and frustrated by their system. Crikey.
If you’re after a gig to go to in the mean time, check out our upcoming events including our current favourites, Drenge at Lancaster Library on the 23rd October.
comments title