We share with you our email of the week.
Letsrun Team,
I was out in Eugene for my first ever Trials, and it was an incredible experience. While I could share many stories about my experience, the one that might interest you most is a series of ticketing errors that resulted in my family having multiple free tickets. I wonder if others experienced the same and if this contributed to low(er) attendance.
The brief version is:
- The ticketing site was overwhelmed on the first day of single ticket sales, with long wait times, and multiple site crashes / time outs during the purchase process
- On at least 3 occasions, I had seats confirmed in my basket but the transaction did not go through (I took panicked screenshots, worried I'd go home empty handed)
- Eventually, I was able to secure seats for all days that I wanted to attend (days 7-10) and paid for 5 seats each day
- On the first day of my attendance, as I was pulling up my tickets, I was shocked to find that I had access to all of the tickets that had ever been confirmed, including those that I did not pay for.
- The "extra" tickets worked to gain entry and both sets of seats were open / unused by others on each day (I purchased 20 tickets but received 35.)
Given the site traffic on the first day of ticketing, numerous site crashes, I would be very surprised if I was the only one who experienced this. It's very strange that the tickets would be reserved / held / provided without any payment, but that's what I experienced. I wonder what impact this had on attendance, both in terms of reported sales (do they base that off of payment received or the "reserving" of seats?) and actual number of people in the stands.
My question to Letsrun nation is, did anyone else experience something like this? IT seemed very odd to me that there were so many empty seats most nights in Eugene when I'd gone to the ticketing website a few weeks before the Trials and saw very few tickets for sale. Were there really that many corporate no shows?
Given the way computers work, if this happened to one guy, 15 unused tickets, wouldn't it have happened to many others - possibly impacting attendance by hundreds or thousands? I'm wondering if this might explain why there were so many empty seats most nights in Eugene but so few tickets for sale.
-Rojo
