Leigh Graydon
Arsenal’s ticket transfer scheme was a useful innovation some time ago. It meant that if a season ticket holder could not make a game, via the service, for the cost of £1, they could transfer their seat to a friend with an Arsenal membership without needing to physically get the season ticket card to them. The service produced a pdf print-at-home e-ticket with a barcode which was emailed to the recipient, once they had accepted the transfer in their online membership account with Arsenal.
However, a few weeks ago, all that changed. Arsenal or Ticketmaster, not certain who, decided to update the ticketing website to make it easier to use on smartphones. However, it went live before it has been fully tested, and ever since it has been a nightmare transferring tickets. It generally works at the stage where the season ticket holder transfers their ticket. However, when their friend logs on to accept the ticket, all kinds of different events construe to ensure that it never works as it used to before the update.
Amongst the following I have experienced…
There is notification that there is a ticket awaiting acceptance, but when you click on the link to it, it says there is not
If you are able to see a ticket to accept, sometimes the next screen offers you both the ticket to accept, and also, separately, the same ticket to ‘buy’ at £0.00 – the consequence of accepting the ticket at this stage is that no e-ticket is emailed, the box office at Arsenal have to be called, they apologetically explain there are still teething problems with the updated website and that they cannot produce the e-ticket. So a physical ticket will be produced which has to be collected from the box office on the day of the game. (This is generally the solution to the various number of ways in which an e-ticket is not produced). When you see this screen, the trick is to decline the ticket that they are asking you to ‘purchase’ for £0.00, log out, log back in, accept the ticket being offered (the invitation to purchase it has gone) and then proceed.
Next up, one of two things happen – Either you get a confirmation screen. In the old days, you could print this out as an option, although now you have to print it from your browser menu. Anyway, all well and good, but this does not always mean e-tickets are then emailed to the recipient. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It’s a lottery. Sometimes the e-tickets are emailed, but hours later, and on once occasion the barcode on the e-ticket was quite obviously not properly produced – it only had about 10 bars on it, so was useless.
The other thing that can happen at this stage is that instead of you seeing a confirmation screen, the system tells you the page cannot be loaded because there are too many re-directs and you need to clear the cookies on your system. And this on three different internet browsers. You do this, and it makes no difference, the page still will not load, and once you see this a first time, you see it a lot with pages on the ticketing website – they simply will not load. In spite of no confirmation screen, sometimes the e-tickets are emailed anyway.
The interesting thing is that given the ‘upgrade’ was made to improve the process of transferring tickets using smartphones, these problems happen whether you are using a pc or a smartphone. So it’s not as if either is a decent option.
One tip I was given by the box office staff. If you try to accept more than one ticket at a time, problems are more likely. So if you wish to accept a pair, do them one at a time, get that single e-ticket and then do the other one. Basically, I have learned from hard experience the dos and don’ts of the system and a process that used to take 2 minutes now takes about 20, although this is because I have found the way to work around the various glitches that the system now throws up. But for the novice, it can be like cracking a safe to use a system that used to be straightforward.
It’s been like this for about a month now. I wonder when Arsenal will get onto Ticketmaster to actually fix it. The page not loading problem is the worst, because it will just happen continually when you try again.
I’ll know when the system has been fixed because I will not get the error screen that does not load due to too many re-directs and references to your cookies. And one more thing. Next time you people decide to ‘upgrade’ the ticketing website, can you actually test the damned thing properly first?
Currently, it’s about as predictable as the first team…
