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wickedgrin, on 29 March 2013 - 01:55 PM, said:

Personally i don't think any other actress could pull it off like Helen Mirren, the play is selling out because of her, the same at the Noel Coward with Judi Dench. I think the producers would lose their profits currently being made if it transferred without Helen Mirren - it might do ok, but I don't think it would have the house full board out like they do at every performance now.

FireFingers, on 05 March 2013 - 01:48 PM, said:

Is that Ealing or Fulham Broadway? Can't see it making the big white way.

Lynette, on 19 February 2013 - 12:27 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.

I think the title of this post is odd because running a secure box office that protects not only the customer but also the management and accounting, is not "antiquated" - it is efficient.

I think the policy of Delfont Mackintosh theatres (who own the Noel Coward) is very good in allowing exchanges in the first place and I don't think it unreasonable to expect to have the original tickets back before an exchange can take place. There are plenty of "ifs and buts", but consider a person simply turning up with no tickets and just saying "I want to change the tickets to another date/time/show" but not actually having them to hand over. The originals would be needed to back up such a request for accounting purposes, otherwise box office staff could issue "new tickets" to anyone they wanted stating that someone had come in and asked to swap them. Can you imagine on a sold out house like the Judi Dench season turning up to find your seats double booked because "someone" some days/ weeks/months had supposedly or did come in to exchange them to another date? What backup would the box office have to prove this request was made in the first place, and you could then have 4 people trying to sit in 2 seats. This would not only cause a huge problem for the box office/the theatre manager and of course the theatregoers themselves.

It's not antiquated, its common sense.

Put yourself in the customers shoes who buys a ticket at the box office, turns up on the night and there's someone in the seat already with the same seat number. You ask "how can they have the seat as me, I bought this ticket....". If the original poster had their way, the answer from the box office would be "oh but someone came in sometime, said they had bought that ticket, couldnt use it, so we exchanged it to another date, and erm....no, we cant prove it because we exchange tickets without having the original to back up the exchange, and then we resold that ticket to you but for whatever reason, the original ticket holder has now sold/ passed the ticket on to someone else and therefore you will have to leave the theatre because we are now sold out.

What would you prefer?