B.C. Place, Ticketmaster offer compensation to U2 ticket holders following lineup fiasco
The May 12 U2 concert at B.C. Place Stadium was supposed to be a triumphant kickoff for the group’s world tour honouring the 30th anniversary of its breakthrough Joshua Tree album.
The evening, however, descended into a ticketing debacle that saw a long line of frustrated, generaladmission fans stuck outside the stadium, which resulted in them missing opening-act Mumford & Sons, a star band in its own right.
Now, attendees who registered complaints over the fiasco are receiving word they will get a measure of compensation for the inconvenience, which some ticket holders are OK with but others, not so much.
Ticketmaster is sending $50 gift cards for each ticket bought, for use against future events, and B.C. Place is offering free admission to a Vancouver Whitecaps or B.C. Lions game, with a $20 food and beverage voucher attached to each entry.
“B.C. Place is dedicated to delivering excellent customer service at every event, and we acknowledge that on this occasion we let you down,” reads the email spelling out the offer sent to ticket holders.
Delta resident Chad Eueverman said he’ll take the compensation but isn’t completely satisfied because it doesn’t make up for having missed Mumford & Sons.
“Ultimately, how do you get a concert from these guys back?” Eueverman said. “You don’t.”
“It’s not a horrible offer,” said Justin Johnson, who had travelled to Vancouver from Philadelphia for the concert in a Twitter exchange with a reporter.
For him, the general-admission tickets cost US$70 each, so “taking the $50 each to put it behind us is probably worth it at this point.”
“Settlement or not, B.C. Place has a blemish on (its) reputation going forward,” Johnson said.
But the offer isn’t much consolation for Victoria’s Brenda Brophy and her husband. Ticketmaster isn’t widely used on Vancouver Island, so the $50 gift cards aren’t much use to them. And neither are soccer or football fans, so they wouldn’t travel to Vancouver just to see a game.
“It’s kind of like getting food poisoning at a restaurant and them saying, ‘The next meal’s on us,’ ” Brophy said. “Well, no, I want my money back.”
Brophy said she’s already responded to B.C. Place that she wants cash compensation, or perhaps free admission to a show of their choice, not credits or gift cards. If someone started a classaction lawsuit, Brophy said she would sign up.
“I’m sure if 5,000 people signed up to get a full refund we would have got something better,” Brophy said.
B.C. Place didn’t immediately respond to Postmedia News attempts to reach an official to answer questions about how much the compensation will cost and who can claim for it, but four concert attendees confirmed with a reporter that they had received the email.
General-admission ticket holders to the May 12 concert found themselves backed up in a confusing lineup behind the security check. B.C. Place officials blamed the foul-up on the credit-card entry system that Ticketmaster was using for the event, which required ticket holders to present the credit card used to buy tickets and to present ID to verify the purchase, rather than scan physical tickets.
Stadium spokesman Duncan Blomfield said in May that while the ticketing system wasn’t new, the U2 concert was the biggest event it had been used for. According to news reports, Ticketmaster ran into problems with the paperless system in 2016 at an Adele concert in Toronto.