Ed’s note – Those of you that read my piece on the semi-final second leg on Wednesday may recall at the end of the piece that I reproduced some text that had been sent to the Arsenal Mailing List about how about 1,000 people were not able to get admittance to the stadium due to the need to go to the box office for paper tickets after their cards had failed to admit them at the turnstiles.

I requested accounts from individuals who had suffered and those that responded have had their stories handed over to AISA, who are actively campaigning on this issue. I am using the opportunity to run a couple of the accounts, with the permission of the writers, and some response from the club. Here’s the first, from Ian Flanagan…

Ticketing/Smartcard Access Problem at Ipswich Town Match 25th January - Formal Complaint

Mr John Beattie, Stadium Manager
Mr Ivan Worsell, Head of Ticketing
Ms Penny Downs, Head of Customer Service

Dear Mr Beattie, Mr Worsell and Ms Downs,

I write to register my dissatisfaction, in the strongest possible terms, with the Club’s woefully inadequate response to the access card problems endured by an enormous number of Arsenal Members at last night’s match versus Ipswich Town.

I am a Gold Member and had purchased 3 additional tickets on Silver Membership cards. I arrived at the stadium with my three friends at 7.30pm and were denied access at turnstile E. We were told by the steward on the turnstile that all of the membership cards would have to be reactivated by a steward with a hand-held monitor. We had to join a long queue next to turnstile E only to be eventually told that the hand-held monitor was displaying the information that no tickets had been purchased by the four membership cards we held. I produced a record of the seats which had been purchased but the stewards replied that there was nothing they could do, as their monitor did not have this information. I spoke to a senior steward at turnstile E and showed him my record of the purchase. He was extremely unhelpful and said the only solution was to go to the Box Office next to the Armoury and try to have replacement paper tickets issued instead. He refused to give me his name and would only identify himself as “Steward Number 85” (the number on his jacket). At this point the game had already kicked off and there was a large crowd still outside undergoing the same problems as we were.

Several stewards pointed out to me that there were significant problems with the membership smart cards access system and a lot of people who had purchased seats were being denied entry and forced to seek replacement paper tickets. I passed the ticket collection booth on the concourse, which had 6 idle staff, who were unable to do anything to assist. The queue for replacement paper tickets at this point ran from the box office, all the way back up the steps to the stadium concourse and numbered several hundred people. After approximately 10 minutes, the queue was moving at a glacial pace and it looked possible that the game would be over before we reached the Box Office. There was a Club Official (without an identifying stewards jacket) who had a handheld ticket monitor speaking to people at the back of the queue. I asked him to check the membership ticket purchase again and, finally, on his monitor the purchase details appeared correctly. He did the same with the additional three Silver membership cards. He obviously didn’t want to run the risk of being over-run by everyone in the queue so he asked us to follow him quietly to Turnstile R (I think), where he produced his own swipe card, which allowed the four of us to finally gain entry. By the time I got to my seat in Block 10, I had missed 25 minutes of the first half. I saw numerous other members clutching paper tickets coming into the ground throughout the rest of the first half and into the second half. If I had waited in the queue at the Box Office, based on how slowly it was moving and the numbers of people involved, I would guess that I would have seen no more than 20 or 25 minutes of the whole match.

The widespread problems which were in evidence last night and the shoddy treatment of loyal supporters demand an apology from the Club. The whole episode highlights the absence of necessary support systems when a problem of this nature occurs and a lamentable failure in terms of customer service. An organisation such as Arsenal should and, indeed, MUST respond better. It is only through sheer luck and the good nature of the supporters inconvenienced that there was not a dangerous and potentially violent disturbance at the turnstiles last night.

I look forward to hearing your explanation of the problems last night. I am aware of the response timeframe outlined in the Club Charter (section 12) and would expect to hear from you with five working days.

On a great night for the team, it is extremely unfortunate that the Club let itself down in this manner and it certainly took a lot of the enjoyment out of the match itself.

Kind regards,

Ian Flanagan

Ian kept onlinegooner.com and AISA in the loop and subsequently emailed this to us…

Dear all,

Further to my mail of yesterday Just wanted to give you a quick update re: Tuesday’s problems.

I had a 30 minute phone call this morning from Penny Downs (head of customer service). She was extremely apologetic and admitted that there were enormous problems on Tuesday. The box office is conducting an investigation into what went wrong.

Essentially there were two main problems:

1. I booked 4 tickets (using 1 Gold and 3 Silver memberships) on 3rd January. At this point, apparently the game had already entered a “friends and family” sale period. When this happens (and when a game has gone on general sale), paper tickets will be issued for all sales (even if those sales are to Gold/Silver Members). I was not aware of this, which is not surprising given that “friends and family” sale is a recent innovation (I think) and relatively few games go on general sale. Given that a large number of Members bought tickets later than usual due to Christmas/New Year etc. a lot of Members were in this situation and did not realise that their membership cards would not permit access to the stadium but that they had to have a paper ticket instead. Apparently, this is stated at the bottom of the confirmation email that you receive from the box office but it is below the preview screen so unless you scroll right through the mail, you do not see it.

2. Problem 1 would not have been so bad had there not been a massive non-arrival of the aforementioned paper tickets. The Box Office had an extremely high volume of calls on Monday from people whose tickets had not arrived by post so they realised they had a problem. They are still investigating but it seems a large percentage of tickets were never posted by the distribution company. So you end up with an enormous queue on Tuesday night of non-members who had bought in the general sale and not received paper tickets and then, on top of that, of members who likewise did not receive the paper tickets they should have received and who had valid cards that were just not valid on the night due to the way the system is structured. This was compounded by the fact that there are 2 types of hand-held ticket monitors at the stadium. The one the stewards have simply tells you whether the membership card is valid for that game (which on Tuesday, this terminal simply reported that “no ticket purchased by this member”). There is a second type of monitor which the box office staff have, which has the full system information stored. Some box office staff were sent out with these monitors to begin dealing with the queue 15-20 minutes after KO and this is how I got in eventually. The queue was still all the back from the box office, to the top of the concourse steps at that point so a lot of people missed most or all of the first half.