Students who attended the Auburn game this weekend woke to a rousing email barring them from future tickets for the season. The culprit? A scanner at Gate 25 that wasn’t hooked into the right systems.
Much like our team’s woes on the field, ticketing seems to be much of the same — high expectations, lackluster results.
Except this time, university officials aren’t to blame. Look no further than contracted third-party company TicketReturn. Its seemingly rigid system simply doesn’t fit the needs of our students.
The system failed to interface properly at the Auburn game, and the lingering issues with upper-deck tickets cannot be resolved by changing the design of the ticket, as TicketReturn simply doesn’t allow it. At $23,000 students deserve, and need, better service, flexibility and reliability.
Ticketmaster seems like a likely candidate to pick up the slack where TicketReturn left off, but we’d encourage university officials to explore other options as well. To us, 20 notepads and pens at the gates to sign in sounds like a better solution right now.
We’d be remiss if we didn’t also applaud the university for taking the right steps to right the 1,400-person mistake in a timely manner. The issue was resolved within the day, and they adjusted the lottery schedule accordingly to ensure a fair requesting period.
While communication at was first lackluster, by the end of the day most were well informed. Special credit goes to Adrienne White, coordinator of student tickets at USC. Would you want to handle hundreds of irate students complaining about an issue you can’t control? We wouldn’t, but she did so with class and patience.
This saga isn’t over, there are still four more home games, and we’ll have to suffer with TicketReturn for the rest of the season. But we can only hope we can move forward, and not backward, from here.