World Cup Tickets

Royale with Cheese

As Ireland have failed to qualify I know it's unlikely, but has anybody else tried to buy tickets for next year's World Cup? It's a bit of a joke to say the least.

I live in Cologne so I have applied for tickets for each of the 5 games in Cologne but experience a few problems while doing so. First of all tickets range from €40-€100 for group games and up to €125 for the second round game taking place in Cologne. I could only apply for the most expensive tickets and then click a box saying I would be willing to accept cheaper tickets if the most expensive tickets were sold out. In other words Fifa are forcing people to buy the most expensive tickets first, so even if the games don't sell out they'll make the most money possible. How can that be legal? Surely I should have a choice.

Secondly they want me to give them €260 for 2 tickets (since I applied for the second round game which costs up to €130 per ticket) in advance (ie right now) stating that I will be refunded the money sometime next summer if my application is not successful or I will be refunded the difference to my credit card if the tickets turn out to be cheaper than €130. Also €5 of that is a delivery fee (a joke since I'm picking tickets up at the stadium should I get some, and they still charge €5). If my application is not successful I will not get that €5 back for either ticket. So they're making €5 on every unsuccesful ticket application.

Finally since mastercard are sponsors of the world cup the only method of payment they take are either a German bank account transfer or Mastercard. Luckily I have both but I'm sure this would be a problem for many people outside Germany.

Complete and utter joke... but I paid anyway. World cups take place every 4 years, probably every 12 years in Europe from now on. I don't ever see there being a chance of being able to go to a World Cup game 5km from my front door again, so I just had to go for it.

p.pete

I'm a bit surprised at only being able to select the most expensive tickets - were the lesser ones on sale at any point? Otherwise they're holding onto a massive amount of money, probably earning interest, while a lot of people who've handed over money will probably get no end product and a €5 loss at the very least.

Disgusting really.

Royale with Cheese

p.pete wrote:

I'm a bit surprised at only being able to select the most expensive tickets - were the lesser ones on sale at any point? Otherwise they're holding onto a massive amount of money, probably earning interest, while a lot of people who've handed over money will probably get no end product and a €5 loss at the very least.

Disgusting really.

Yeah the excuse they give for only selling you the expensive tickets is that most of the tickets on sale at this stage are ones being returned by fans who bought tickets for all their countries game, and their country ended up not qualifying. Apparently most of these tickets were category 1 but still they state more or less on their site that they're selling all the category 1 tickets before the cheaper ones. Single tickets went on sale last May(when I didn't know I'd be living in Cologne) so you were able to apply for the category 3 and 4 tickets at one stage, just not anymore... even though there's probably some still left.

p.pete

Plus the tickets they're selling now are being done as a waiting list rather then a lottery (I'm not quite certain on how it works, possibly first come first served?) so basicly they'll be holding a lot of peoples money until they get to the stage where they tell you you're definitely not getting a ticket...

Royale with Cheese

Just got an email from Fifa. Have been allocated 2 category 1 tickets (€100) for the Czech Republic - Ghana game. I was hoping not to receive category 1 tickets, and this was probably the game I wanted to see least taking place in Cologne but they're much better than not getting anything which is what I was pretty sure was going to happen.

Woohoo!!