Well what do you know, further to my recent rant on the media coverage of the death of MJ and the potential fiasco with ticket refunds things have just gone from bad to worse!
It is well documented that AEG (O2 Arena) failed to get insurance to cover all 50 MJ shows at the O2 Arena. Reports seem to suggest that they could only manage to insurance to cover 10 of the dates.
Suddenly they come out with a very "generous" offer to fans. If you decide not to take your refund (and respond by August 14th) you will get a souvenir ticket instead. So AEG (O2 Arena) get to print a ticket for £10 and keep the additional £40+ per ticket. NICE MOVE and a great way of recouping some of the losses as a result of not being able to get full insurance. Some people seem to think that these tickets will gain value over years but at this moment in time, if everbody took one, there would be approximately 800,000 of them in circulation, hardly a limited edition rare run now is it?
Of course if you just bought one ticket at £50 - £75 then you might be able to write off the amount to get the little souvenir. I would imagine though that anybody who bought 2 or more would be less likely to see the souvenir ticket as an attractive proposition against a full refund.
What AEG (O2 Arena) should have done is given full ticket value refunds and then used the extortionate booking/admin fees to supply all purchaser with a souvenir ticket as well. Of course there is no money in that and so they will screw the purchasers over instead.
Totally outrageous, I am not impressed with their attitude at all. So here is my reworded statement from the O2 website that I quote last week:
"At this moment our thoughts are with Michael's children, family and friends. We will announce ticketing information in due course once we have worked out how we can maximise our profits and fleece those that are due for a refund in order to recoup the shortfall as a result of us knowlingly booking 50 dates when we could only get insurance to cover 10."
Will be interesting to see if they stick with this policy or it gets amended at some point.
1 comment:
Great post Keith. It is an absolute disgrace. Full refund plus the iniquitous administration fee and transaction fee and any other extras that they impose on us instead of just charging face value for tickets
Alan
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