Emails to Ticketek

A rational argument, exchanged with Ticketek.

Hello,

I purchased 2 x tickets to the 2009/2010 Cricket Season Aus vs Pak ODI (Sun 24 Jan 2010) on Nov 8. They were meant for my father for Christmas. Unfortunately, I have since discovered that he will be overseas on that date.

Would it be possible to exchange the tickets for equivalent seats at the Aus vs WI ODI match on Feb 12? I understand that this may incur an exchange fee.

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Thank you for contacting Ticketek.

When a booking is made online all details of your booking are displayed to you. Prior to submitting your payment you also indicate your agreement to our Terms of Sale. (This policy applies to all bookings, including those made over the phone, via www.ticketek.com.au, or at a Ticketek agency or box office.)

Ticketek is unable to offer you a refund or exchange for this transaction.

You are able to view all of our Frequently Asked Questions which also includes our Terms of Sale under our Help page at http://premier.ticketek.com.au/content/help/faqs.aspx

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Dear Ticketek,

While I understood the terms and conditions at the time of purchasing, I did not know my father would be out of the country at the time. I was hoping you had some sense of Christmas spirit or sensible customer service or something.

Maybe you don't understand the situation:
I'm not made of money.
Being not made of money, I can't buy Aus vs WI tickets until someone buys the Aus vs Pak tickets.
You won't exchange them.
As per your T&C, you won't allow me to sell them either.
So there are going to be two empty seats at the SCG for that game and two seats you could have sold at the other game.
Charge me a fee, I don't care - that's two lots of fees you could have collected for the simple act of putting two seats back on sale and selling another pair.
There's more than a month to go until the match, it's not like you can't resell the seats. All you're doing is preventing ME from reselling the seats. It's a form of restraint of trade.
And now I don't have a Christmas present for my dad despite planning ahead and buying tickets in early November.

I hardly think this issue is 'Solved'.

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As a once off I am going to refund your current booking minus the handling fee. The credit will take up to 2 business days and you will need to log back into MyTicketek and repurchase the new tickets.

I hope you can understand that Ticketek has an obligation to retain ticket sales on behalf our promoters and venues. Although you didn't know that your father was going to be overseas this doesn't mean our terms of sale become more flexible and that we are always going to be able to change dates or offer refunds on already sold tickets.

Please destroy any printed ezyTickets as they will no longer be valid.

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And just because I CANNOT let go of how stupid ticketing, as a business, is:

Hello,

Thanks for your response, this is very good news and I appreciate it.

I would suggest one change to Ticketek T&C and that is allowing ticketholders to resell tickets up to face value. That, or develop a forum for people to swap tickets for events they can no longer go to for whatever reason. I'm sure every day of the year someone falls sick or has something urgent come up at the last minute that prevents them from going to an event while others are desperate to get tickets.

Otherwise, how else can ticketholders prevent wasting tickets? There's no system in place.

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I DARE someone to come up with a system that benefits both the venue/promoter and the ticket agent AND stamps out scalping.