Re: Manchester shows
Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2008 3:36 am
The website booking runs on a best-available basis. It will have decided those seats are the best available and offered them to you. When you rejected them, they went back into the system and when re-requested tickets, it offered you these again as they are, according to its programming, the best available tickets. If these tickets were bought in between you declining and asking again, it would have offered the next-best-available tickets and so on.hydriot wrote:I've just tried a dry run for Manchester, pretending I want a top-price ticket for Evita, and it was worse than random. After I rejected a ticket and tried again, five times it offered me the same ticket again: A26 - in the front row but way over to the left.
But as you say, there aren't really any options to choose specific seats on the online system - the site would be constantly grinding to a halt as thousands of people all try to specify the same tickets.
The phones and the ticket centres allow you to specify seats, but this runs the risk of losing seats - in the time it takes to select some good seats and hold them to complete the booking, they have often been bought by someone else. It can be quite frustrating to be offered various different really good seats, then be told someone else bought them a second earlier.
For large pop events, we usually offer the best-available option first - this means we grab what the computer thinks is best and have them held to complete the booking. Often, a customer will demand that we look into the seating plan and try to get different seats. In the time it takes to do this, they've often lost the first seats offered to them and ended up further back.
This kind of thing applies more to massive events (Take That, anyone?), but it does show that there's a slight gamble in requesting a specific area. Personally, I think it depends on what the computer offers you. Usually it's very good, but it can't account for personal preference (say you'd rather be further back, but in the middle, rather than close to the front but on the side). In these cases it might be worth asking the agent to look around.
I'd recommend making yourself well acquainted with the seating plan before you book (get it here: http://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/seatingchart/189249/10862). In case you've not been to a theatre before, bear in mind that the stalls are ground floor, the circle is above the stall and the gallery is above the circle. Between rows F and Q in the stalls and from row A to G (roughly speaking) are the prime positions, but pretty much everywhere will still offer a good view.
Um... I think that's pretty much all of my knowledge exhausted. Have fun tomorrow morning!
!!! I am so happy for you 
! You deserve this kindness 
