everything wrong with the ticket sale
I wrote a lot lol. Also, I’m a U.S hive so I can’t speak too much on what international hive went through, but I have seen videos on their experiences. Nonetheless, correct me if i’m wrong on anything
Beyhive presale:
I, like many others, thought that being eligible for the beyhive presale was gonna be a good thing. I was gonna get my tickets early, and not have to worry about fighting for tickets during the other presales or during the general on sale. But to my surprise, I was met with nothing but expensive ticket prices and a crashing website. I think this happened for many reasons:
Allowing people to subscribe to Beyonce.com, and thus be eligible for the beyhive pre-sale, after the tour was announced. It should’ve only been for people who were subscribed prior to the tour being announced so that the true beyhive were able to get tickets and not people who became a fan after the Beyoncé bowl or worse didn’t even like the album until then. This just led to an increased demand and thus dynamic pricing.
The dynamic pricing. I watched a ticket go from $300 to $900 in real time. Nosebleeds were being sold for $500, and the 100s were being sold for $1000. What the hell???? Additionally, it’s truly upsetting that the beyhive presale prices were damn near three times that of the Verizon and citi presale prices. I can’t help but be a little upset to hear people talk about how they only paid $200 today for their ticket yet I paid over $700 for the same section yesterday. I think the blame is obviously on Ticketmaster for being greedy, but also on Beyoncé for not opting out of dynamic pricing like many other artists have.
Ticketmaster not being prepared for the presale demand. Obviously, with such a big artist like Beyonce, there’s going to be hundreds of thousands of people wanting to buy tickets and Ticketmaster knows this yet the website crashed on numerous occasions. I heard stories of people only having 500 people ahead of them in the queue just to be kicked out for no reason and having to join back in and then having 90,000 people ahead of them. And then there were cases in the UK where the map didn’t show up so people couldn’t even click on tickets to buy. Stuff like this is so crazy, especially when Ticketmaster knew that there was gonna be a lot of people on the website trying to buy tickets.
Codes:
I can’t even count the amount of times I had to enter a code. Whether it was having to enter the beyhive presale code every time I refreshed the page or having to enter the OTP code to enter the queue, it was very annoying.
I strongly believe that the process would’ve been a lot smoother if we had to enter the code, whether it was a presale code or whatever, in order to join the queue. That would’ve weeded out a lot of people that joined simply to see the ticket prices or bots.
Don't quote me on this, but I heard that for the France dates, people were able to buy tickets during the beyhive presale even if they didn't have a code as there were times when the website didn't ask for it. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of the presale???
Verizon/Citi Presale:
There seemed to be a lack of information regarding this pre-sale. For starters, we were not told that club ho down was not going to be available during this presale. A lot of people wanted those tickets specifically and weren’t able to get them which is disheartening. Secondly, we also weren’t told that certain tickets were for only for Verizon customers and certain tickets were only for Citi customers. And last, Verizon and Ticketmaster should’ve clarified that Verizon business customers were not eligible for the presale, especially when Ticketmaster kept saying that all Verizon customers were eligible.
DC hive not being told that they weren’t eligible for the Verizon presale since Verizon has a partnership with Ticketmaster and the DC tickets are being sold through seat geek.
Vegas:
- Girl where’s Vegas at?? Now I understand if things still haven’t been worked out for whatever the Vegas plans are, but i’m sure Vegas fans are feeling left in the dark. I saw a couple of them say that they are facing the dilemma of buying LA tickets, or waiting it out for the eventual Vegas dates/plans. Either way, some transparency would’ve been nice.
All in all, this was a very stressful experience and I hope a lot of things are changed for next tour. Despite that, I’m still gonna have a fun time at the tour, I’ll see y’all there!
And for those who weren’t able to get tickets yet, don’t give up!! I was in your shoes last time for Renaissance and I eventually got my tickets (great tickets might I add) so don’t worry and stay positive! Alright good night y’all :)
Edit: It seems that club ho down was available for the citi cardholders, but not for Verizon customers which is definitely unfair