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My wife is mad about Prince – and she’s been so supportive and understanding while I’ve been immersed in this Digital Marketing book project, that on the spur of the moment I decided to see if I could snag a couple of tickets for his upcoming concert in Croke Park.
Off I went to Google.ie to search for Prince Ireland. The first entry in the results page that was for Prince concert tickets was this one, from a crowd in the Netherlands called worldticketshop.com. All of the right bells and whistles were there… verified by Verisign, SSL secure server, etc. – but the cheapest tickets on offer were for €265, which seemed a bit on the steep side.
This was going to be more expensive than I’d anticipated… or was it?
I went to Ticketmaster.ie, which of course is where I should have gone in the first place, and bought two tickets for €66.50 each (and before I’m labelled a cheapskate let me just say that I looked for the the €89 category, but it had sold out, and the higher priced tickets seemed a bit on the extravagant side – so we’ll be a little way from the action, but hey, we’re there for the music, right?). Total cost for two tickets including Ticketmaster’s do f**k all fee handling fee (who are they trying to kid on an automated website with e-mail ticket delivery?) €145.70. Or about €120 cheaper than one ticket from Worldticketshop.com. Sorted.
What this really illustrates is that you need to be careful what you search for on Google, and shop around before you buy. Searching for Prince Ireland returned a few results for books from Amazon.com, followed by the rip-off worldticketshop.com site. Had I searched for Prince Tickets instead, two of the first three organic results returned would have been for Ticketmaster.ie.
So buyer beware – and remember that Google’s results are only as good as the queries you throw at it.
I purchased tickets to see Cold Play from World Ticket Shop – BIG MISTAKE. The conert is next week, I don’t have my tickets and am having HUGE hassles trying to communicate with World Ticket Shop. Apart from the fact that I paid WAY too much for the tickets they won’t send the tickets to me at my home address, they want to send them to me the night before to a Hotel address. I have to travel some 2,500klms to the concert venue and don’t have enough faith that World Ticket Shop will get the tickets to me in time so I am staying home until the tickets arrive here. If I’d done a bit more research would have brought the tickets from the right company, not only would I have paid less but I would have them in my hot little hand right now and not be going through major stress dealing with a company who are totally rude and pig headed.