30 replies to this topic

[Steve10086]

blahblah, on 19 February 2013 - 09:14 AM, said:

Sorry but having the tickets back before doing an exchange is standard practice and makes sense to a box office, its management and accounts dept. If tickets are exchanged without the orginals then as far as i'm concerned then it is open to abuse and has poor management.

Exactly!  I can't understand any argument why they *wouldn't* insist on having them back before exchanging.

[Lynette]

ok
once last go:
When you book a flight online ie an eticket you can get slight changes to the timing etc later on. You receive this info online, another eticket.  No one tells you to send back the first one......it is all online, all digital, all systemised...

Thanks for the responses folks.

[FireFingers]

A plane ticket has your name on it, so can't be resold. Even if the name on the ticket has 1 letter difference, they won't let you board. So unless you want everyone going to the theatre to be ID'ed, then the systems aren't comparable.

[armadillo]

FireFingers, on 19 February 2013 - 03:37 PM, said:

A plane ticket has your name on it, so can't be resold. Even if the name on the ticket has 1 letter difference, they won't let you board. So unless you want everyone going to the theatre to be ID'ed, then the systems aren't comparable.

Indeed - there aren't thousands of airline ticket touts but there is *nothing* to stop you putting your cancelled tickets on eBay and some poor sucker buying them and turning up at the theatre to find he'd been conned. Your airline analogy would work if your theatre tickets had been etickets. Which is why I don't get the obsession some WOSers have  with having tickets posted to them. If everyone had etickets then cancelling without the potential for fraud would be possible. Though of course you'd still have some people who'd want a ticket in advance as a present but they must be in a minority.

[Honoured Guest]

Some ticket agencies, especially for gigs, do use Lynette's "airline" e-ticket system. Everyone who turns up on the night has to be individually checked off against a master-list, and also has to present acceptable i.d. to prove they are the true purchaser. It takes forever. It wouldn't work at a theatre where everyone expects to be admitted for a set performance start time. Lynette would start a moaning thread about it...

[Steve10086]

Yeah, I don't really fancy airline ticket rules when arriving at a theatre!

[xanderl]

Although x-ray scanners on the way in might prevent some bad behaviour

[Matthew Winn]

They could create a complex system with digital verification that would allow tickets to be tracked and set up something so that anyone buying tickets from a third party could verify that the tickets were valid, but what would be the point? They'd just be spending an immense amount of money to achieve something that they can already do just by requiring the tickets to be returned first.

[Lynette]

I surrender.

[Tina]

Just a thought, dont know how expensive it would be to implement, but.............
How about what they do at the RAH, whereby the ticket has a barcode, said barcode is scanned on entry, that way if someone (for example Lynette) changed her tickets for another date, the barcode on the originals can be made to be invalidated, therefore eradicating the need to have them returned in order to exchange