Waiting by the Phone

Did you all see this over at Backstreets?

Hearing reports of hard-to-believe phone calls from ComcastTIX to shut-out fans, offering them fans another shot at Philly tickets.... that seemed like something to doublecheck. I spoke with Dave Homan, COO of New Era Tickets (which handles ticketing for Comcast), who confirmed that's exactly what they're doing.

"It's not a scam," Homan told Backstreets this afternoon. "We know that we have some people who tried but failed to get tickets, for whatever reason, either it sold out or they couldn't get through.
We have their names and addresses because they pre-registered. So, going through the ticket limits now -- all the people that went in eight times and got eight different sets of four, we're killing those tickets and trying to call the people back who didn't get tickets, to be proactive and give them a shot at buying them."

There's a heads-up as well: any customer who purchased a number of tickets over the stated limit of four for the Philadelphia shows will have their order knocked back to four; additional transactions after the first four tickets will be cancelled.

So that leaves a bunch of newly available tickets. "I know if I just threw them on the internet," Homan continues, "the scalpers would just pick them up the second I put them on there. So we're trying to take
care of the real fans."

We have no information on how fans themselves can be proactive in this instance; but if you pre-registered for the Philly sale and didn't score tickets, you might want to stay close to the phone.-September 13, 2007