I don’t usually use my blog for rants, but this time it is inevitable. The reason is a website that is widely used in Italy: www.ticketone.it (don’t forget the”www.”, it doesn’t work without.). I tried to buy tickets for an event called “Chiasso danza” in Chiasso, Switzerland using my browser of choice Firefox, Safari, Opera, I even tried Sunrise and others.
I always got the same error: “Error during seat assignment. Please try later”. So I tried again later. For four days always the same. So I looked for the customer service and found an email address. I described friendly and in the best italian I could what happened, the system and browser I used, and so on, and got an answer on the next day, which read something like this: “If you don’t use Internet Explorer we can’t help you.”. What? This is 2007. This is not even funny.
Ok, I turned on my rarely used Windows PC and fired up Internet Explorer, version 7 and tried 6, too. But also here, no luck for me. I wrote back to the customer service in a less friendly, but still objective, way that I had no luck even with Internet Explorer. Of course, no response. How can TicketOne just ignore the users of their websites? Small theaters like the “Cinema Teatro Chiasso” have to use their services, because they can’t afford their own online ticket system and I suppose they pay a lot of money to TicketOne, for a service that doesn’t work and doesn’t even care about their customers.
Beppe Grillo a well known blogger and entertainer in Italy stopped selling tickets for his shows on TicketOne. He wrote a post on his blog about it. According to this post TicketOne has a substantial monopoly in Italy.
We will see what happens. I really hope that more event organisers and artists see the problem with TicketOne and use other services.