Rodeo admits to mistake for concert
New ticket system, typo led to long wait for fans of Brooks
Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo officials apologized Wednesday for a series of blunders that led to hourlong lines and countless headaches for fans trying to get into the Garth Brooks concert Tuesday evening.
Joel Cowley, president and CEO of the rodeo, said a miscommunication sent to one-day ticket holders and a new ticketing system led to a backup of fans waiting to get into NRG Stadium for the show.
“It was really our screwup that created this, and we apologize to our fans,” Cowley said Wednesday afternoon. “We wanted this to be a great experience for them to come in and see our opening night and brand-new stadium presentation. Some had to wait in line an hour to get into the stadium, and we’re embarrassed by that.”
Helicopter footage showed lines snaking around NRG Park, through food tents and into the carnival Tuesday.
Cowley said the first mistake came after a staff member typed the wrong time in an email sent to
single-day ticket holders, telling them gates for the concert opened at 5:15 p.m. when they weren’t scheduled to open until 6 p.m.
That led hundreds of folks to get in line nearly an hour early, creating a backlog that the rodeo’s new ticket system could not handle quickly enough.
When lifelong Houstonian Tom Craddock arrived at NRG Park on Tuesday, he saw people lining up as early as 5:15 p.m. even though the rodeo portion preceding the performance by the country music legend wasn’t scheduled to start until 6:45 p.m.
Craddock decided to take his time, perusing the livestock show in the NRG Reliant Center and getting food before returning to the line around 6:55 p.m.
By then, the line nearly reached the food tents and went past the Champion Wine Garden.
As he waited, he heard others groan about a new mobile ticketing app making its Houston rodeo debut — Flash Seats. They blamed it for the lines’ crawling pace.
“Sure enough, when I got to the front, people were trying to pull up their flash tickets on their phones. The internet wasn’t working, they didn’t have proper IDs — it was all due to the flash tickets,” Craddock said.
Cowley said this was the first year the rodeo had used mobile tickets via Flash Seats, which also provides ticketing services to events at the BBVA Compass Stadium and Texas A&M University. In the past, rodeo concert tickets sold online were sent to fans as PDF attachments they could print or pull up on their phones.
He said the ticket scanners’ capacity to verify the mobile tickets could not keep up with the backlog created by the number of people who arrived early. To prevent future slow-downs, Cowley said, Flash Tickets has doubled its processing capacity for the rest of the rodeo’s concerts.
Craddock, who has been coming to rodeo shows every year for the past four decades, said he and his group used paper tickets Tuesday night, something they plan to do again for the Blake Shelton show Thursday.
Cowley said the mobile tickets should be working fine for the rest of the concert schedule. Country music band Little Big Town was scheduled to take the stage Wednesday evening.
“Tonight will go great,” Cowley said Wednesday. “Far fewer tickets were sold to begin with, and we’ll have a crowd that probably won’t arrive on the onset.”
There were no lines after gates opened for Wednesday’s rodeo and concert. Visitors who walked up had their tickets scanned and got into the stadium’s grounds in less than two minutes. An hour after the night’s opening act began, a steady stream of concertgoers continued to flow past usher Ada Mejia. “No beer,” she yelled to one group. “Last night there were people who couldn’t even move,” she said. “It’s much better now. But it’s still a lot of people.”