Ticketmaster randomly cancelled my gig tickets — twice

Muse are my favourite band, so I was excited when they announced a small gig at Brixton Academy in London ahead of the release of their new album The Wow! Signal, and delighted when I managed to secure presale tickets for myself and my wife. Unfortunately, I was about to embark on a three-week journey through a maze of disappointment and customer support threads that exemplified many of the wider problems I write about on this blog.

Before we even get to the other problems, the tickets’ face value was £125. Including all the added fees, I paid nearly £284 for tickets for myself and my wife, which is an extortionate amount of money – especially for a smaller, more bare-bones show aimed at the band’s long-time, hardcore fans.

Still, I reluctantly went through with it. I didn’t know if I would ever have a chance to see Muse in such a small venue again, and I hoped that it was the sort of gig where they might pull out some rare songs. I should be clear that at this point there was nothing unusual about the ordering process – I waited in a queue, selected the tickets, and paid with my card via a Ticketmaster account I’d used to order many tickets across a period of at least 13 years.

Once I got over the dent in my bank account, I was extremely excited. Having seen them separately before, this gig would mark the first time my wife and I had seen Muse together – and what a special gig to mark the occasion!

Branded as a bot

On Tuesday, three days before the gig, I received a notification on my phone. It was from my email app, and the subject line made my heart drop:

TICKETS CANCELLED for Muse at O2 Academy Brixton

Working in cyber security, my first response was suspicion. Was it a phishing email trying to trick me into an emotional, knee-jerk reaction? Had someone hacked my Ticketmaster account and tampered with my tickets somehow? But the more I looked into it, the more I was sure that this was a real email from Ticketmaster. Here’s the main gist of the body of the email:

At the request of the Event Organiser, your order for the event below has been cancelled. It has been identified that bots were used to make this purchase, which violates the tour’s terms and conditions… Barcodes on the cancelled tickets are now void and will not allow entry to the event.

That was it – no explanation, no appeals process. Just a pair of cancelled tickets and the promise of a refund in seven to ten business days.

Monitoring the situation

I knew I couldn’t just accept the decision, but I also knew I faced a battle with a Kafkaesque tangle of support agents. Ticketmaster’s website directed me to its chatbot, and to their credit once I got through to a human they at least said they’d try to help me – I had expected to be dismissed outright. All I could do was wait, so I dug around to see if anybody else was affected.

And they were! There were a number of seemingly legitimate fans on the Muse subreddit complaining that Ticketmaster had cancelled their tickets out of the blue. The (unverified) comments in that thread suggested:

1. Where people received explanations from Ticketmaster, the most common reason for the cancellation was that the email address used for their album preorder (which granted access to the presale) didn’t match the email address on their ticket order. I double-checked and I had definitely used the same email address across both.

2. There were no comments that suggested anyone had received any meaningful support and had their tickets reinstated.

3. One commenter said a friend of a friend who works at Ticketmaster claimed that the bot search is only performed when requested by the artist playing the gig – although this is obviously just hearsay.

More concerningly, a separate thread showed other fans receiving emails to say more standing tickets were now available. Had Ticketmaster stripped me of my tickets and resold them before I’d had a chance to respond? With my support thread stalling and only two days until the gig, I contacted everyone I could in the hope somebody might be able to help. Here’s what I got:

Let down and hanging around

It was on Thursday afternoon – the day before the gig – that I finally received a substantial update. Ticketmaster said my case had been reviewed and my tickets were to be reinstated. I was to queue as usual at the venue and speak to the box office to have them reissued. Problem solved – or so I thought.

A detail that will soon become very important is that the email did not state any action was required unless I wanted to cancel my tickets. Of course I wanted my tickets, so I wasn’t concerned with that. The gig was back on!

Tickets will be held under the buyer’s name… If you would prefer a refund for your tickets, respond to this email no later than 4pm today.

However, on the night, disaster struck for a second time. I queued for two hours, reached the box office (which turned out to be two people standing behind a barrier), and was told that my tickets were cancelled and refunded because I didn’t reply to Ticketmaster before the deadline. That’s right – the deadline they gave me to respond by if I wanted to cancel my tickets.

There was nothing the venue staff could do – they were just reading from a clipboard with an A4 printout from Ticketmaster and SJM. By 8pm, we were left standing on a dark side road in Brixton, watching people file into the gig that we’d been looking forward to so much and feeling completely let down.

We were left standing on a dark side road in Brixton, watching people file into the gig we'd been looking forward to so much.

It was then I made an executive decision. A resolution on the ground seemed impossible, and the chance of getting a response from any of the companies involved before Muse hit the stage was near zero. So I saved the fight for later and did something I’d usually avoid at all costs: I bought tickets on resale for an extra £175 markup, hoping I’d claw it back from those responsible later.

The final result

I tried to put the cost – now totalling almost £500, all included – out of my mind and enjoy the concert (as always, Muse smashed it, and it’s sad that’s a footnote in this story). The next day I sent Ticketmaster an email, explaining that my tickets were cancelled a second time due to their misleading email, detailing the extra cost incurred, and requesting suitable compensation.

I namedropped the Consumer Rights Act, Trading Standards, and the small claims court to indicate that I’d take further action if Ticketmaster failed to reach a satisfactory resolution. I fully expected them to push back on my request, disputing my conversation with the box office or claiming my purchase of tickets from a third-party reseller was unreasonable.

To my surprise and their credit, they did actually try to put things right. About a week and a half later, Ticketmaster sent a very short email to say that they were reimbursing £175 to my card. This already felt like a win, and was quickly followed by an email from SJM Concerts with an apology for the mix-up and the offer of two free tickets to a future event of my choosing.

Nothing can completely make up for the stress of the evening – I was unable to fully relax and enjoy my favourite band, and that can’t be fixed – but it’s more than I expected, and shows that in similar situations it’s certainly worth following up and remaining persistent when a company has wronged you.

Symptom of a trend

To be clear, I understand why Ticketmaster is trying to identify bots – I’d even say I support those efforts. But before cancelling tickets, it should be sure that the user is a bot. It’s disappointing as a fan to miss out during the sale period, but it’s even more disappointing to think you’ve secured a ticket to see your favourite band only to have that taken away with a single email.

The bigger issue is the manner in which all this happened. The bot detection is automated and has a track record of cancelling legitimate orders. It was never explained to me why my order was called out. The process is so opaque that it’s hard to say how its accuracy could be improved, but you’d think human review of the flagged orders before cancelling them would help.

Worse was how impersonal the process was from that point. A phone call with a human who cared could have sorted the issue in minutes – but I had to use a chatbot, transfer to an agent, migrate the conversation to email, and face a chain of delays and generic responses before getting anywhere.

When I did encounter humans – the box office staff outside the venue – they were just as powerless as I was, constrained by the limitations of a one-size-fits-all system that didn’t allow them to take action for a customer they could clearly see had been treated badly. Anybody who was empowered to act was hidden behind the obfuscation of asynchronous emails, copy-and-paste company policies, and “we’ll get back to you in X business days”.

This is the reality of the modern mega-business, when a company grows so large that individual cases don’t matter to a leadership that consumes only abstract reports and metrics. My customer experience was awful – and there are many fans who were blocked from the gig altogether – but somewhere in Ticketmaster headquarters, those cases represent 0.001% on a dashboard displaying billions in revenue. The reality on the ground is obscured.

I don’t believe it’s impossible for a big business to provide good service. It’s difficult, and requires an intentionality from the top which in many cases is absent, but it’s often as simple as triple-checking before taking actions that could disappoint customers, reading emails before sending generic replies, and empowering frontline staff to fix obvious problems quickly. Any one of those, and we wouldn’t have been stuck on that dark road in Brixton.