Seating snafu for Prince’s Melbourne VIP ticket buyers

Furious Prince fans who bought $750 VIP tickets for his Melbourne State Theatre shows on February 16 and 17 bombarded the Facebook pages of Ticketmaster and promoter Dainty Group after initially assigned wrong seats.

Rather than placed in the first five rows, their booking emails advised their seats were in Rows 6 to 15.

Ticketmaster blamed the glitch on human error and VIP patrons would receive what they paid for. It offered a $100 Ticketmaster gift card as an apology.

The ticketing agency explained, “Due to human error, a small number of VIP package customers received email confirmations with incorrect seating details. Fewer than 100 customers were affected across four shows. Ticketmaster has rectified the issue and contacted the impacted patrons.”

Ticketmaster had further issues in New Zealand when 4,000 tickets for two shows (6.30 pm and 10 pm) at Auckland’s ASB Theatre on February 24 sold out in ten minutes.

Angry fans hit social media venting about Ticketmaster’s errors, which included offering customers the expensive tickets when they had indicated the $99.90 ones. Others complained that its website was struggling a minute after tickets went on sale. “Your website should be able to handle incredibly high levels of demand,” one fan scolded.

Responding to complaints of website and phone line issues, Ticketmaster issued a statement: “We have not closed our phone line, but we have a limited number of calls we can accept at one time and due to massive demand some calls may not get through. Please keep trying our phone line, we apologise for delays.”

In a later post, it said, “We’re sorry that you were unable to get tickets to Prince. Due to the limited amount of tickets available and massive demand the tickets sold very fast.”

Some VIP ticket holders were also not impressed that after paying almost NZ$1500 (including booking fee) they were not getting a meeting with the star himself. They told NZ media that their VIP status granted them a red carpet walk, a cocktail party, booze, commemorative T-shirt, poster and laminate, and early access to merchandise sales. But no meet and greet.