Ticketmaster buying you more tickets than you asked

Nebuchadnezzar

I used the ticketmaster email service where they send you the tickets via email and you print them out. Anyway i bought 3 tickets and i received what i thought to be 2 identical emails with the same 3 tickets attached in each. Now i didnt bat an eyelid at the fact that i thought i had 2 identical emails (foolishly in hindsight) because i only recieved ONE CONFIRMATION email stating the paid amount for just 3 tickets. So i thought i had 3 tickets for the event when in actuallity i had 6 and those 3 extra went to waste

So anyway I didnt realize i was charged for 6 tickets till after the event and i got my creditcard statement and thought there was obviously a stupid mistake here so i then i rang up ticketmaster and asked them wtf why did they sell me 6 tickets and only send me a confirmation for 3? They said if i had told them prior to the event then they could have done something but since the event is over and finished now they cant do a thing? WTF??

Even if there is nothing i can do to get my 111euro back I just need to get this out in the open to let other people know what might happen and i am interested to know if anything similar has happened to others...

Thanks,
Paul :mad:

jor el

Since Ticketmaster are unwilling to do anything at this stage, your options are:

Contest the payment with your credit card provider. Did the transactions appear separately (2 charges for 3 tickets) or all as one (one charge for 6 tickets)? If two, tell them you only authorised one and the second was a mistake on Ticketmaster's part. If all in one, produce the email receipt showing 3 tickets were purchased.

Failing that, Small Claims Court would be the only other way to get your money back. Use the same receipts as above to support your application.

Nebuchadnezzar

Thanks a mill for the speedy repy Jor el. It was down as 2 separate payments on my statement which probably doesnt help my situation much but i might give the credit card company a buzz about it and see what happens

Thanks,
Paul

ztoical

Nebuchadnezzar wrote: »

It was down as 2 separate payments on my statement which probably doesnt help my situation much

I would have thought have two separate but identical payments would be more helpful to you as it would show there was a good chance they put the same order in twice by mistake. Maybe I'm wrong - would the CC company not have a record of when the authorization was made for the two payments and if they were right after each other it would be more likely a mistake as it would take you longer to order 3 more tickets.

foggy_lad

ztoical wrote: »

I would have thought have two separate but identical payments would be more helpful to you as it would show there was a good chance they put the same order in twice by mistake. Maybe I'm wrong - would the CC company not have a record of when the authorization was made for the two payments and if they were right after each other it would be more likely a mistake as it would take you longer to order 3 more tickets.

yes op this is most likely what has happened so go check with your credit card company and they will probably sort this out for you.

Pegasus15

jor el wrote: »

Failing that, Small Claims Court would be the only other way to get your money back. Use the same receipts as above to support your application.

There's a small fee for the Small Claims that's something like €13 (open to correction, but it's not more than €20), but the majority of cases are found in favour of the consumer

Edit: Oh, just found this: https://smallclaims.courts.ie/esmallclaims/claim/Main?page=home&Language=English

Also, if you check out the guide here, you'll see it's actually only €9.

sweet-rasmus

Hey, i noticed that last month (4th of Feb, in case it's the same date as yours) ticketmaster charged me for the tickets I purchased twice , but thankfully next refunded one amount. I was annoyed enough to see that I was charged twice in the first place. Perhaps this double charging happened to a few people...

Nebuchadnezzar

I actually got my tickets in january so maybe this whole charging you twice BS is just random and happens all the time. It seem to have happened to this guy too :

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055035294&highlight=ticketmaster

well upon ringing the creditcard co they told me to send them out a detailed letter of the incident including ticketmasters response and all that and they will get back to me within a month of them recieving the letter to tell me what the story is. So i suppose ill find out then... and failling that, small claims court might do the trick! :cool:
And thanks for the feedback people
Paul

sweet-rasmus

I suppose its worth a try. It's not gonna cost you to write a letter, though I fear all they can do is give out to ticketmaster for their dodgy work. Best of luck!

Grawns

In my experience as a trader if a customer disputes a charge on their credit card statement it is up to the trader to prove the contract exists. They only sent you one confirmation email for 3 tickets so they will have to prove to the card company that they were correct in billing for 6. Thus the onus is on ticketmaster. The credit card company will contact them and give them notice that the transaction will be cancelled and the money refunded unless they can prove their case.

I'm pretty sure you will get the refund.

Guido999

I just signed up to post that I'm going through something similiar with ticketmaster right now.

Basically, their online system messed up and I ended up getting charged 3x as much for 8 tickets...

I talked to Ticketmaster and the refused to do anything, so I talked to my credit card company. They unfortunately cannot do anything, so I'll have to take it up with Ticketmaster again.

At this point, I may be going to small claims court. Did you have to end up doing this?

In my case, what happened was I opened up two browser windows. The last browser window was for a more expensive set of tickets. I closed it and submitted my order with the 1st window which showed a lower price.

However, their online system only remembered my last opened window, and ended up buying the more expensive ones.

Now, in my opinion, the window that was first open showed a lower price. If the price was no longer valid, it should not have allowed me to order it.
The window itself showed a lower price is my basic defence. Kinda like, if you have a button on a window, that button should be for that window.

Its really being a drag dealing with this....

eth0_

Unless Ticketmaster can prove that you bought the 'extra' tickets, and prove that their email system sent you a confirmation for those extra tickets, I don't think they would have a leg to stand on.

Bring them to the small claims court.

jor el

Guido999 wrote: »

In my case, what happened was I opened up two browser windows. The last browser window was for a more expensive set of tickets. I closed it and submitted my order with the 1st window which showed a lower price.

However, their online system only remembered my last opened window, and ended up buying the more expensive ones.

Now, in my opinion, the window that was first open showed a lower price. If the price was no longer valid, it should not have allowed me to order it.
The window itself showed a lower price is my basic defence. Kinda like, if you have a button on a window, that button should be for that window.

Its really being a drag dealing with this....

That's a strange one. I don't know a lot about how browser sessions work, but I'd imagine that when you opened the 2nd window and added tickets to your cart, it updated the information stored by the 1st window, overwriting it. Then you close the 2nd window and click the "Confirm" button in the 1st window, which confirms the purchase that was updated in the 2nd window. Strange if that's actually how they work, but I've never gone as far as the confirmation page in a purchase and not confirmed immediately. In this case, TM will be able to prove you did order the tickets and as such the credit card and Small Claims may not be able to do much for you. It was, effectively, your mistake, unfortunately. Worth trying though.

In Nebuchadnezzar's case, it seems that TM will be unlikely to prove his double order, and hence would loose the case against the credit card operator.

Guido999

Thanks for your feedback, what a trying time.

I understand they they can say "our system did receive an order for $1691" and it orginated from your system. It may have arrived via a 2nd window updating the first, but none the less, you still initiated it and u made a mistake by opening the second window. In fact, we have proof that we sent you an email confirmation for $1691.

But can I argue that they charged me $1691 without my consent? Meaning, the way they present first window with $595, that is what I am consenting to.

If their system, with the second window, 'behind the scenes', updated the shopping cart via some session id.... that is doing so without my consent. That second window has a "purchase now" option, but by not clicking on it, I did not authorize it? They way its laid out, you only consent to it if you click on the "purchase now button".

Do you think that kind of argument is fair and logical? Its like signing a piece of paper, what you sign is what the button is attached to.

They do have a code of ethics (ironically), and it does say, fair and honest business practices.

Alun

Was it two separate browser instances, or two tabs in the same browser window?

I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding is that if you have opened up two completely separate instances of the browser then a web app at the other end will generally see this as two separate instances and therefore two sessions. If, however, you open up two tabs in the same browser window they share the same instance of the browser and will not create a new session. The link between the browser and the session is usually done with a cookie, and in the tabbed example there will be one and the same cookie for each tab. I'm guessing then that the application saw this as two open requests for tickets from one and the same session, and when you pressed "Submit" or whatever it was it processed both of them.

Nebuchadnezzar

HORRAY!!!! Ticketmaster refunded my money back!!!! :):):)

Now the strange thing is that they did it 2 days after my initial post ie. the 20th and at that stage i hadnt even sent the letter to the credit card co detailing the event. But as i had given a brief summary of what happened over the phone to the creditcard co then maybe from that information they contacted ticketmaster and ticketmaster took it seriously as it was a creditcard company and not some whiney customer because the last thing the tickmaster guy said to me on the phone was that there was nothing they could do. BUT WHO CARES! I GOT MY MONEY BACK! COMPLAINING PAID OFF!

Imo ticketmaster must just have some dodgey software running on their website and thats why so many people seem to be having similar problems. Anyway, Tommy higgins lives about 5 houses up from me maybe i should stroll up and tell him to get his company in order...

Thanks all for the feedback!
Paul