Thousands of people have been left out after rushing to get their hands on tickets to one of Australia’s biggest alternative music festivals.
Chaos has erupted online after a frantic scramble for festival tickets caused an accommodation website to crash and left hopeful festival-goers without passes despite having paid for them – some more d ‘Once.
Pre-sale tickets for the rock, metal, punk and emo festival Good Things, due to take place in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane in December, became available at 10am on Tuesday.
Soon after however, fans complained that booking site Oztix had taken their money, but crashed before it could confirm the tickets had been successfully purchased.
Streams of angry people were quick to express their disappointment at the technical glitch, with many grieving that they had been charged up to seven times for tickets they weren’t even sure of. ‘have.
A furious customer claimed he was scammed out of almost $3,000.
“This seems to be standard practice with Oztix. My credit card has been charged seven times, I haven’t received a confirmation or tickets yet. I have no idea if I have 0 tickets or 14 tickets now.
“Oztix has turned off their phones and not responding to emails and I’m $2,800 out of pocket,” they wrote in a comment on the festival’s Facebook page.
“Couldn’t confirm ticket sales on pre-sale website. But just found out I’ve been charged multiple times to my card without any purchase confirmation. Pretty terrible,” another annoyed person wrote.
“It seems like it happens to a lot of us. The purchase of tickets for the Good Things festival expires but still takes our money. I assume this means that we will receive tickets by email or post at some point. F***ing boring,” said another.
“I tried for two hours to get tickets and it just kept timing. I didn’t know it took seven times money from our bank account which I am now madly trying to get back from. one way or another… and still no tickets. Are the organizers aware of the problem with the venue?” said a third.
The company then turned to Facebook to address customer concerns on Tuesday afternoon, promising frustrated Oztix users they would be refunded for any duplicate tickets purchased as a result of the error.
“Good Things Festival would like to highlight the issues with our pre-sale this morning. Oztix, our ticketing partner, unreservedly apologizes to all affected fans. We are absolutely blown away by the demand for our festival and can’t wait to see you all in the pit in December,” the company said in a statement.
Oztix blamed “unprecedented demand” for the crash.
“While exciting in many ways, there were some technical difficulties. The ticketing system worked as expected, but payment processing experienced significant delays in response time between the system, the gateway of payment, banks and vice versa.
“This delay in receiving a confirmation from the bank means that some customers have made multiple attempts to purchase tickets and have been charged multiple times. All order receipts are currently being sent to customers and any customer with multiple orders will be reimbursed this afternoon and will receive a reimbursement receipt.
Oztix confirmed that those who had been charged would eventually receive their tickets.
“If you have been charged more than once, you will be refunded. We will let you know once this process is complete and if you have any further questions at that time, please contact us and we will assist you,” he said.
While many expressed they were triggered by the company’s use of the term “unprecedented” given the extent of its use during the Covid pandemic, others said the crash of its site was inexcusable.
“Unprecedented shouldn’t be a word in OzTix’s apology vocabulary. Heavy and fast traffic should be expected for any event like this. Instant sales are nothing new, and with the proliferation of services like AWS (where peak demand can be met and met with proper resource scaling), this sort of thing should never happen,” one response read.
“I’m sorry but frankly, not good enough. How many times will ticket agents “underestimate” demand because they refuse to have adequate servers online for big events? said another.
Others were more forgiving and appreciated the company’s explanations and work to resolve the issue.
“I’m looking forward to my refund on the extra ticket order I didn’t need. Thank you for working so quickly,” one person said.
“Thanks for the update, I was having a heart attack from the amount of tickets I bought,” wrote another.
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