It’s 8:58AM on a Saturday morning and I’m waiting to get U2 tickets for the Montreal show on July 16. They are building a freaking stadium for this show and then tearing it down! Upon closer inspection to the virtual snapshot of what the area at the Hippodrome would look like, it looks like a bunch of bleachers are being built.
The other day I was trying to get Bon Jovi tickets and they sent me to this new website I have never seen before. www.geg.ca (I believe it’s managed by the Bell Center). It looks like they have incorporated some form of queue system where you wait inside a queue (or the waiting room as they call it) until you get your tickets.
Now, we all know this is what happens with all other websites. They virtually put you into a queue and you wait and when your turn pops up, if they have tickets still available, you nab em. I have developed some strategies over the years to make sure I’m in the queue. First off, if I log in a few hours before the sale, I tend to find that I can make it into the queue. I theorize that it tracks the fact that I have been sitting on the web site for awhile and allows me access before the people who log in…15 minutes before they go on sale.
www.geg.ca does this quite well. Last night I logged into the site and let it sit. This morning I surf to the home page and there is a big banner indicating the U2 concert is on sale this morning at noon and I should click buy tickets. Upon clicking it, it says I am entering the waiting room and this process should take a minute or two. Sure enough, I am now sitting in an area where I can look at the proposed stage design, look at the different price levels and enter my account information. It also says that while I am in here, I have reserved my virtual ‘place in line’ and I shouldn’t move from this page.
If this works, I must say that I am quite impressed with it. Sure, some people may cry foul because they didn’t realize that they could log in around 9AM and get a spot in the virtual line. But I compare it to the souls who physically camp out in front of the box office in order to get some highly sought after tickets!
Now that I know this website uses this method, I will definitely set my alarm earlier in the morning to see if the waiting room opens up earlier.
In the meantime, I’ll spend my morning doing what I usually do and around noon, hopefully I will come back to the computer and it will say ‘Congrats! You just got yourself six tickets to U2!’
Update: Well the software is quite useless. It turns out that members in the ‘waiting room’ are chosen randomly. Karilee logged into the waiting room area around 11:50 and managed to get us all tickets (awesome!) but I was still left waiting until after the entire show was sold out. I hope I don’t have to use this system too much more in my lifetime! Unless they change the process so that it is a true queue, it’s quite ridiculous to have a random choice system.