Ticketmaster has made a royal mess of issuing tickets to King Charles’ coronation concert at Windsor Castle, angry fans are saying on social media.
The ticketing platform was charged with handling applications to attend the BBC event linked to the U.K.’s first coronation in 70 years. The concert will take place on May 7, the day after King Charles III’s official coronation, and will feature performances from Andrea Bocelli, Lionel Richie, Katy Perry and other stars.
Twenty-thousand tickets, released in pairs, were made available to the official coronation event by public ballot, according to the Royal Family’s website.
Applications were due February 28, and tickets were allocated “based on the geographical spread of the U.K. population, and not on a first-come first-served basis,” according to the Royal Family. In other words, it didn’t matter when you applied for tickets, as long as you did so before the deadline.
But fans vying for entry to the post-coronation celebration say Ticketmaster sent them misleading instructions. Many say they received emails suggesting they had won tickets to the event, only for the tickets to be unavailable when fans tried to claim them online.
A Wallingford, England, resident called Ticketmaster “disgraceful” in a tweet after the company emailed her April 25 to say she had been “successful in the ballot for a pair of standing tickets” to the once-in-a-lifetime event.
“Disgraceful from @Ticketmaster — receive an email saying I’ve won 2 tickets to the Coronation Concert in the ballot and then when you click to claim them they’re all gone. Total shambles of a system. Beyond disappointed,” she wrote on the social media platform.
The email from Ticketmaster indicates she was one of a “randomly selected group of ballot winners” offered tickets in a “supplementary round.” The tickets were made available to her on a “first come first served basis,” read the email, which encouraged her to act quickly to secure her spots.
Apparently, she didn’t act fast enough, and won’t be attending the concert after all. She bashed Ticketmaster online for writing “congratulations” and ultimately leaving her empty-handed.
“‘Congratulations’ and ‘ballot’ don’t marry with a first come first served system, especially as the main Ts and Cs specified it wouldn’t be like that,” she added on Twitter.
Another user called out Ticketmaster for failing to adhere to its own stated terms and conditions. She, too, was under the impression that tickets would not be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
“What a poor experience and incredibly misleading!” she said on Twitter Thursday.
Ticketmaster defended its ticketing process. The company said there were two lottery rounds and that unclaimed tickets from the drawings were recently released under different terms and conditions. Previously, applicants had three weeks to claim their tickets. This time they were allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
“Everyone who was successful in the two main ballot rounds for the Coronation Concert was offered a guaranteed pair of tickets, provided they claimed them within three weeks,” a Ticketmaster spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch. “On Tuesday, any unclaimed tickets were released on a first-come, first-served basis to those who had previously applied to the ballot (and were unsuccessful). These inevitably went very quickly.”
Ticketmaster recently came under fire over how it handled unprecedented demand for Taylor Swift concert tickets.
Swifties complained that they weren’t able to secure tickets, while resellers hawked them for tens of thousands of dollars, forcing diehard fans to spend a fortune in order to see the artist perform. The snafu prompted investigations into the entertainment company over its alleged monopoly on the market.
On Wednesday, Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Richard Blumenthal introduced legislation called the “Unlock Ticketing Markets Act” to create more competition in the live event ticketing market.
“Right now, one company is leveraging its power to lock venues into exclusive contracts that last up to 10 years, ensuring there is no room for potential competitors to get their foot in the door,” Klobuchar said in a statement Wednesday. “Without competition to incentivize better services and fair prices, we all suffer the consequences. The Unlock Ticketing Markets Act would help consumers, artists and independent venue operators alike by making sure primary ticketing companies face pressure to innovate and improve.”
