[ad_1]
Many Beyoncé fans hope to score one or two tickets to the Renaissance Tour — but bride-to-be Elena Trierweiler has a more ambitious goal.
Next week, Trierweiler and her bridal party will try to secure 14 tickets so they can celebrate her bachelorette party at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, in September.
Trierweiler is well aware that her plan may hit roadblocks in light of the high demand and recent issues with Ticketmaster during high profile tour sales.
“My friends and I are big concertgoers, so we’ve had beef with Ticketmaster for years,” said Trierweiler, 32, of Oakland, California, adding that the group plans to Slack updates throughout the process. “We have a plan for how many people are going to be available to get in the queue and try to purchase tickets. We usually try to overshoot and are in communication while it’s happening.”
Their biggest challenge will be navigating the Ticketmaster presale process, which many fans have described as frustrating, difficult and sometimes disappointing.
Most recently, long wait times and technical issues disrupted a November presale for Taylor Swift’s coming “The Eras Tour,” leaving thousands of fans in the lurch and prompting Ticketmaster to cancel the public sale. Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing examining Ticketmaster’s dominance in the ticketing industry.
Beyoncé’s tour will be Ticketmaster’s biggest test since the Swift debacle. Trierweiler and other fans are determined to bypass the chaos. Ticketmaster, which didn’t respond to a request for comment Thursday, also has a slightly different strategy, which it outlined in a blog post this week.
In recent years, Ticketmaster has offered North American fans the option to register as “Verified Fans” to enter lotteries to be able to buy tickets. The feature is meant to dissuade scalpers, according to Ticketmaster.
With the Eras Tour, Ticketmaster said, more than 3.5 million people preregistered for the Taylor’s Verified Fan sale, the largest in its history. Typically, it said, about 40% of preregistered fans who are invited to buy tickets actually do so, and they buy an average of three tickets. Ticketmaster said 1.5 million fans were invited to buy tickets, while the remaining 2 million were waitlisted.
Read NBC News’ past Ticketmaster coverage:
Ticketmaster said that the Verified Fan process usually restricts the number of people coming to buy tickets but that it didn’t work as intended with Swift’s Eras Tour.
“The staggering number of bot attacks as well as fans who didn’t have invite codes drove unprecedented traffic on our site,” Ticketmaster said at the time, “resulting in 3.5 billion total system requests — 4x our previous peak.”
As with the Eras Tour, Ticketmaster said, ticket sales for the Renaissance Tour will be staggered and require fans to register to ensure that real people, rather than bots and scalpers, are buying tickets. There will be multiple rounds of ticket sales: a Verified Fan presale for fan club members, a Citi Verified Fan presale exclusively for cardholders and a General Verified Fan Onsale. Verizon customers will also have access to an exclusive presale for select shows through their customer loyalty program, Verizon Up.
Live Nation said it will also try to “create a less crowded ticket shopping experience” by staggering registration for Verified Fans into three groups, according to region.
Some fans will ultimately walk away empty-handed.
“Registration does not guarantee tickets,” the company said. “We expect there will be more demand than there are tickets available and a lottery-style process will determine which registered Verified Fans receive a unique access code and which are put on the waitlist.”
Already, many members of Beyoncé’s enormous fan base — known as the BeyHive — have expressed skepticism that the Renaissance Tour ticket rollout will be any smoother than it was for the Eras Tour.
After Beyoncé announced the tour Wednesday, social media was flooded with memes and jokes, some at Ticketmaster’s expense.
A spokesperson for Beyoncé didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
“ticketmaster still not recovering from taylor swift tour seeing beyoncé announce her world tour,” a user tweeted, using an image of Squidward from the cartoon “SpongeBob SquarePants” looking anxious.
Others said chaos seems inevitable.
“OOP y’all thought that Taylor swift Ticketmaster situation was a mess wait till the Beyoncé tickets officially go on sale it’s about to be a war,” a user wrote.
Some said they aren’t even sure it’s worth trying to try to buy tickets.
“I’m basically traumatized from the Taylor Swift Ticketmaster situation — my hope to actually get Beyoncé tickets is zero,” a Twitter user wrote.
Some online also tried to deter others from trying to buy tickets by making jokes about unconfirmed news surrounding the tour.
Jokes aside, many expressed that they are still willing to go to great lengths to nab tickets — even if it costs them a lot of money.
“Take my money, Beyoncé,” a Twitter user wrote. “Don’t play with me, Ticketmaster.”
Ticketmaster hasn’t said how much tickets will cost.
The company has faced complaints about its “Official Platinum” feature, which offers variable prices based on demand. For example, tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s coming tour were listed as high as $5,000 apiece on the first day, CNBC reported.
The Renaissance Tour, which is scheduled to kick off in Stockholm in May, will make over 40 stops across Europe and North America before it culminates in New Orleans in September.
Should Trierweiler and her bridal party fail to get tickets, there is no back-up party plan. That is, unless Beyoncé adds tour dates in 2024.
“At this point,” Trierweiler said, “I’m pretty committed to it being this or nothing.”
[ad_2]
Source link