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Gigs & Festivals
Tate apologises for website failure in Kraftwerk ticket rush
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 14 December 2012
Tate has now issued an apology to Kraftwerk fans, after its website failed to cope with demand for tickets to the eight shows the group are staging in the Tate Modern Turbine Hall next February.
As previously reported, Tate Director Nicholas Serota initially defended his organisation’s website, saying that it was usual for there to be problems for high demand events and telling the BBC: “This isn’t the first website that’s crashed through over demand. The Olympics site did something similar. I’m sure it will work steadily. Frankly we could have gone to a… Ticketmaster, [but] we didn’t think we wanted to give 20% of the ticket price an organisation of that kind”.
But work steadily it did not, with the arts company yesterday admitting that “the majority of tickets had to be sold over the phone”, adding “We believed that our system could cope with the volume so did not appoint a third party ticketing site”.
It also apologised for confusion about whether or not tickets could be purchased from the Tate Modern itself, saying: “We expected to sell most of the tickets online before the galleries opened and did not anticipate selling tickets in the gallery. [But] some customers came to Tate Modern and we made the late decision to sell tickets to them to avoid their disappointment. We are sorry that this was not communicated as an official route to buy tickets and subsequently led to more frustration from other customers trying to buy tickets online and by telephone”.
With all tickets now sold out, disappointed fans were urged not to go to secondary ticketing sites, as entry will only be granted to people able to present the credit or debit card the ticket was purchased with. So, as anyone who can remember as far back as the Radiohead paperless-ticketing fiasco back in September will already have realised, we probably haven’t seen the last of complaints and frustration surrounding these shows.
