NYCC’s Lackluster Response to Ticket Problem

Anyone who has been following the blog for more than a few weeks has probably realized that New York Comicon is one of my favorite events of the year. NYCC is responsible in no small part for my current level of geekiness and the existence of this blog. Every year I look forward to the panels, exhibitors, sense of geek community and most of all, a weekend of unadulterated geeking out with my friends. This year however, it looks like I will be venturing to NYCC alone.

Now to be completely fair, I won’t be there entirely alone. There will be nearly 130,000 other geeks attending the convention alongside me, making NYCC one of the largest geek events in the country. By comparison, San Diego Comic-Con clocked in around 133,000 people last year, making it only slightly larger than NYCC 2013. It’s also likely that one or two of my friends will manage to acquire a ticket through various means—though that is by no means assured. The root of this issue is not that my friends are slackers or were caught unaware, but that there have been some pretty serious ticketing issues surrounding NYCC this year. This year, when three day and single day passes went on sale the NYCC website crashed. As a result of this crash, many people who were in the process of buy tickets were locked out and therefore unable to purchase the tickets that were already in their cart. Certainly hundreds and likely thousands of people were denied the ability to buy tickets.

While NYCC should have done more to prevent system crashes, it is somewhat understandable that they had a problem. Last year it took several weeks for tickets to sell out. This year however, four day passes were sold out in under an hour. Such huge difference is very difficult to anticipate and thus makes planning the required server “surge volume” a much more daunting task. The failure to adequately plan and prepare however, is not my major complaint. I am much more upset with NYCC’s response to the problems. Immediately after the crash almost no information was given to people who had been locked out. A little bit of information was put out via social media, but to be realistic, when I’m having a problem with a site, Twitter and Facebook are not my go-to sources for reliable information. In fact, if anything, I consider them far less reliable when something is going wrong because social media is a feeding ground for rumors and misinformation. Even if good information is there, it tends to get lost in the chaos.

NYCC’s next response came about four days later in the form of an email sent to those people who had contacted customer service. Here is the email in its full text:

Apologies for a less than personalized response, but as I’m sure you can imagine, we are getting a lot of emails about the New York Comic Con ticket roll out on Thursday.  I want to get you a timely response so this note serves to address the majority of questions and concerns that we are hearing from our fans…

First off, our goal is for you to be happy.  Our fans being unhappy brings us no joy whatsoever.  Happy fans make everyone at ReedPOP happy.  I know, however, that you, and many others are not happy fans today and no matter what to reason is for that unhappiness, please know it bums us out as well – to say the very least.

Second point to share is that we always strive to listen and improve.  We’ve gotten a ton of feedback and we are hear it and will do anything we can to improve the experience for all of our fans.  That is a promise.  We’ve never promised to be mistake free, but we do promise to always work hard to fix our mistakes and get better.  So bottom line – please know that your concerns and frustrations are heard.

OK – a few of the major issues point by point as best as I can clarify/explain them:

At noon, the New York Comic Con website crashed.  The actual ticketing site did not crash.  In an effort to be helpful, we posted a link direct to our ticketing platform on our social media channels.

Our ticketing site was mobbed and moved extremely slowly.  We know this was frustrating and a problem – but it was a simple issue of volume and demand.

At one point, 3 day tickets still remained so we posted that fact on social.  When it quickly became clear that those 3 days tickets evaporated we removed that post to not to cause confusion.  We did not remove it to cancel out negative feedback; we don’t ever do that, we can take the feedback we simply did not want to have a post out there saying 3 days were available if they were not.

We put a post on social reminding people to refresh their shopping cart, to assure it was current, not to refresh the queue.  Refreshing the queue will not move you ahead in line in any way.  There was confusion on this and many people appeared to refresh the queue, not the shopping cart as we advised.

A technical point to remember is that someone may be holding 3 days ticket in their cart, therefore the inventory of 3 days will still show them remaining UNTIL that person actually clears the payment and checkout page.  This is why availability showed, and then rapidly declined as 3 day tickets went from being held, to being purchased.

The queue moved slowly, we know this and have made it abundantly clear to our ticketing vendor that this is unacceptable, but it did move.

This is also not a new system.  This is the identical ticket system we used last year.  The fact is that the demand for tickets was on a greater scale than even we imagined.  For an example, last year 4 day tickets took over 8 weeks to sell out, this year they took 40 minutes.  The simple fact is that there is an extremely high demand for a limited supply of tickets.

We know scalping is an issue and one that we hate nearly as much as you do.  I’ve gotten a few emails asserting that we are somehow in favor of our tickets being on the secondary market and nothing could be further from the truth.  Nothing.  3 years ago there was no limit on the number of tickets an individual could buy.  Last year the limit was 10.  This year the limit was 6.  This is a reflection of our effort to limit the number of tickets one person can purchase for the sole purpose of putting them on the secondary market to line their own pockets.  We have contacted eBay and they will not do anything to help us ban these sellers and in almost every instance, the sellers contact info is blocked.  We will continue to pursue these one by one but when demand outstrips supply, capitalism dictates that someone is going to find a way to meet that demand.  And as of typing this email, our count across eBay, StubHub and Craigslist showed about 700 tickets being sold, or about .05% of the total tickets that were sold on Thursday.  Still too many, but not a conspiracy or epidemic either.

Lost in a lot of this is that retailers will be selling tickets starting in mid-July and that Thursday, Friday & Sunday tickets are still available online.  As I look at the content we have in the works for this year, we don’t have a “weak” lineup any day of the show.  Our goal is to make every day of the show a day jammed with killer experiences.  Also, don’t forget that New York Super Week will bring great nerdy programing to dozens of venues all over the city for an entire week.  Throw in Special Edition: NYC (which took place in mid-June) and we hope it shows that we realize more people want to go to NYCC than we can accommodate and we are trying to create more opportunities for more people to have more fun.

In closing, I know if you did not get the ticket you wanted or experienced difficulty with the entire process, this email is not going to fix that.  It’s not going to get you that 3 day ticket you so wanted.  And I and the entire team are really, really sorry for that.  What I do hope is that note clarifies some of what happened, clears up some misconceptions and most of all conveys that we are listening, we are sorry for your experience not being all that you deserve and that we are committed to making it better.

Yours in nerd,

Lance

The email starts out with the standard general remarks and apologies that one would expect from an email of this kind. Past the less-than-heartfelt mea culpa is where things start to come apart. The next several paragraphs describe what happened with regards to the crash and social media, but do so in a manner that attempts to remove all blame from NYCC. The gist of the text says “this is what happened, but it’s not really our fault.” I would love to hear the reason that NYCC thinks that any of this isn’t their fault. Claiming that they did their best after the fact doesn’t fix the problem, especially when it’s pretty clear that they didn’t do anything close to their best.

The email then goes on to discuss scalping, which is a problem for any major event that sells tickets, be it sports, concerts, or conventions. Since I believe in giving credit where it is due, I will say that limiting purchases to six tickets does help to slow down scalpers trying to buy up all the tickets. On the other hand, this email was sent out only four days after tickets had sold out. To try to claim that scalping isn’t an issue so soon after tickets sold out and so far in advance of the actual event is delusionary at best. If they came back with those same numbers a week before the event and made the claim, I’d say they were justified in doing so. But with almost four months to go before the event, they don’t have anywhere near enough information to make that claim. In addition, while 700 tickets is small in comparison to the total number of tickets, it is by no means an insignificant number, especially when they’re selling for nearly three times their face value on Ebay.

I think the closing portion of the email is probably the most insulting. First Lance begins by saying that tickets will still be available at retailers, which was a valid statement at the time. Of course there is no information provided on when those tickets might go on sale, nor a list of retailers involved. They also failed to mention that all of the retailers are located in New York and New Jersey. Seeing as how this has become a major geek event for at least the entire East Coast, if not the most of the country, I guess everyone who doesn’t live within 50 miles of NYC is shit out of luck. Also, given the problems with ticketing, there was an even bigger demand for retailer sold passes than ever before. People were lined up outside of Midtown Comics for more than a day to get passes! Most people I know don’t have that kind of time. The last paragraph in the email, “In closing, I know if you did not get the ticket you wanted or experienced difficulty with the entire process, this email is not going to fix that.  It’s not going to get you that 3 day ticket you so wanted,” was like a slap in the face. Having read that far, I can’t imagine anyone having any delusions that the email was going to make everything better.

I am well aware of the fact that ReedPOP, the organizer of NYCC, is a business and that they must make money just like every other business. I’m also very aware that they can’t just make up more tickets out of thin air, and that the number of available tickets is based on things like the maximum occupancy of the site and other concerns, which NYCC has absolutely no control over. What NYCC does have control over is how they sell their tickets, how they respond to problems, and most importantly the respect with which they treat their customers. Between this fiasco and last year’s Twitter hijacking, NYCC is starting to show an alarming disrespect for the people who make this event what it is, the fans. If they keep up the attitude of putting the fans second to other concerns, then what has been a highlight event will very quickly start to fade into memory.

Maybe my standards are too high, but I expect that when an organization fails as significantly as ReedPOP has, that they take a better approach to deal with it. A company should not jump on the defensive so quickly. Instead they should admit where they have made mistakes, point out where they can do better, make promises that are reasonable and achievable and then make good on those promises. If that email had said how sorry they were, without trying to push all the blame away from themselves, I know plenty of people who would have been disappointed, but not nearly as upset as they currently are. If efforts had been made to give people as much information about tickets that were still available and that were going to be made available, that would have also helped. I guess all it would have taken is for people to feel like they were being treated like people and that they were cared for as much as they care for NYCC.  As it is, I’m disappointed in the response from NYCC–I expected better.