Country music fans wanting to purchase tickets online and over the phone at Renfro Valley Entertainment Center in Kentucky were met with major headaches. Many top headliner shows including Gretchen Wilson, Dwight Yoakam, Jusin Moore, and the Oak Ridge Boys went on sale at 10:00 AM EST on Friday, February 3rd.
Thursday night, Renfro Valley posted on their Facebook Page the following: "WOW! It's hard to believe that Friday, Feb 3rd is tomorrow! So much planning & preparation has went into this 2012 Headliner Concert Series. All of the Renfro Valley staff has been hard at work getting everything ready for 10am tomorrow morning. The website has had a complete upgrade when it comes to ordering tickets to make it much more user friendly and all phone lines will be staffed! We are all so excited about this amazing season and look forward to preparing your ticket orders in the morning!"
When fans went to order, they were met with busy lines on the phone and long delays if they were able to get to connect. Online, fans would receive a screen that said the credit card processor was down or that the credit card had already been used and to pick another for payment. Several found themselves thinking they received one set of seats, only to find out that the website already sold them by the time they checked out.
Immediately people posted their frustrations on the Renfro Valley Entertainment Center's Facebook Page. Many posted that they were charged multiple times for the same seats or different seat selections. With the screen messages, many thought the website didn't take their card. Instead, they were charged several times. As of 1:00 PM EST the phone lines to Renfro Valley Entertainment Center were still down and the website was still displaying the messages.
On it's Facebook page, Renfro Valley posted in response to questions. They indicated in regards to the credit card processing online, "Our credit card processor is slowing down the transactions and causing issues. If you multiple charges to your card we will correct them as soon as possible."
In regards to multiple credit card payment transactions, Renfro Valley responded to postings with, "If you were over charged or double charged we wil refund you the over charge amount, just make sure you're able to get the tickets you were purchasing. If your received multiple invoices please email a copy of them to cc@renfrovalley.com and we will make sure to take care of any over charges or other issues. We apologize for the inconvenience."
As of 11:00 AM EST, Renfro Valley posted the following: "Due to the massive amount of website traffic and phone calls we're getting right now the ticketing system is bogged down. I just put through a test order for online tickets and everything went through okay. If you've had trouble getting online tickets please try again. As the traffic slows the system will become more responsive."
Renfro Valley states on their website that they plan on selling more groups of tickets in March and April. Hopefully with today's ticket purchasing problems, Renfro Valley will consider selling only one concert per day. With multiple high-profile concerts going on sale at once, the website traffic and phone traffic overloaded the systems.
For more information on Renfro Valley, go to www.renfrovalley.com.
Comments