Taylor Swift fans were left disappointed across the country on Thursday as tens of thousands of fans missed out on the chance to secure tickets for her three-date run in Dublin’s Aviva Stadium next summer.
Fans of Swift, who has an avid global following, crashed the Ticketmaster site last week ahead of the launch of tickets for the UK leg of her Eras Tour.
Many fans were left asking questions of the Ticketmaster site after this week’s Irish sale too, despite a number of precautions being implemented.
Tickets for the singer’s three shows were made available at staggered intervals throughout the day, with the aim of providing all fans the opportunity to access the presale.
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Detailing her attempts at securing tickets, Holly Barnes from Thorpe Bay in the UK said: “We never got any. I registered for tickets for all of the UK and Ireland dates, but I only got codes for Dublin. I got placed at over 50,000 in the queue each of the three times today. By the time I got through there were only the really expensive ones (VIP packages) left.”
Reflecting on missing out on all three Dublin dates, Holly added: “I’m absolutely gutted. It was already bad enough that local hotels were charging extortionate money for rooms.”
Izzy Bennett, an American graduate student, also had an arduous day trying to secure tickets to one of Swift’s three Aviva Stadium shows.
“The process itself was more long than difficult,” she said. “We got the chance to register for the presale link at the end of June and then you found out on the fifth if you got a code. Myself, my boyfriend, his aunt and his cousin all registered for the link, but I was the only one to get one out of the four of us.”
Detailing the painstaking process, Izzy recounted each of her three failed attempts at securing tickets, saying: “The first queue I got in five minutes after it initially started, and I was already behind about 75,000 people. The second time, it appeared to be just a random order and not matter when you joined the queue, and I ended up around 32,000. Then 28,000 on the last.
“Pretty much everything was sold out except for the VIP tickets which I think were the only things available. I’m not a hard-core fan but I do love her, and I’m from the US so a lot of my friends have been going to shows over there, and its made me really want to go for myself,” she said.
“By the time the second queue had begun, people online were just commiserating one another about the wait times. And then you could see people selling tickets straight away and we’re left wondering: how do people have them so quickly?”
The issue of how people managed to secure tickets so quickly when others apparently joining at the same time or earlier were thousands of places behind was also raised by Sandra Murphy from Limerick.
“Each time I entered a queue I was the exact same number, 56,000 on all three occasions. My sister also had a code and she was 68,000 every time. That’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence. I actually joined the third queue after my sister but was still somehow 12,000 places ahead of her,” she said.
“I don’t mind missing out on the tickets if its just a case of more people wanting them than are available, but if its predetermined, that’s the problem. The same thing happened me with the sale for Liverpool on Tuesday, and the UK and Irish Ticketmaster sites are the same,” she said.
Sandra was one of the lucky few though who was able to snag tickets to alternative shows on Swift’s upcoming European tour, remarking: “I managed to get tickets for the Paris and Stockholm shows actually.”
Speaking about the difficulty in obtaining reasonably priced tickets, with the lowest priced seating options set at €86 and standing at €126, she said “There’s a lot of VIP tickets, and they seem to pretty much be the same kind of seats as the general admission ones – it’s just that you get a few stickers and stuff with them.
“The pricing is definitely not great and that’s obviously down to Taylor and the promoters. There’s definitely too many set aside for VIP and they definitely hand out too many presale codes for the amount of tickets they have available for sale,” she claimed.
“The point of the codes was that you weren’t sitting in a queue. Basically, I was stuck there for an hour and half three times today. That’s my day gone, wasted,” Sandra said.
“I’m disappointed but at least I’m going to other shows. There’s people with kids and stuff who definitely have it worse, and just the whole way it was handled is annoying and angering.”
Similarly, Eddie Barnes and his friends from Belfast tried and failed on each attempt to buy a ticket, with Eddie signing up for the Edinburgh presale also, “I signed up for a Dublin code and an Edinburgh code, and they were both exactly the same, just a shambles.
“We were in the queue every single time, dead on time, and we still didn’t get any chance of tickets at all. We’re actually convinced that the waiting numbers displayed were preallocated because all of our queue numbers were in and around the exact same”, he said.
“I don’t think the numbers displayed were accurate. We were 65,000 in the first one, and after just 5,000 tickets we were told that all standing tickets were gone, then only 2,000 later it updated that all seating options were gone as well.
“This is the first time that I’ve ever had this type of experience trying to get tickets to a concert. Even, say, Beyoncé, who is massive – every single time I’ve seen her its never been an issue, we didn’t have to do any of this rigmarole. This whole experience has just been crazy.”
In the initial aftermath of Thursday’s sales, fans were further aggravated when tickets began appearing on various resale sites online for multiples of the original selling price.
“We looked on a resale website called viagogo, and for the Saturday concert there was two standing tickets going for €4,500. It’s crazy and I really feel sorry for all the absolute diehard Taylor Swift fans who’ll have to splash out hundreds if not more for a VIP package,” said Eddie.
“Once we eventually got in, all that were left was VIP packages, so we filtered them by price and the cheapest one left was €450 per person, which is mad.”
Responding to the difficulties, Ticketmaster said: “There were no issues on site or with the queue. Everything fans need to know about tickets, and how to avoid losing their place in the queue, can be found on the Ticketmaster blog.”
