Bought some tickets for Palace online last night, and was reminded of how rubbish our online ticket system is. I know I left it late blah blah blah, but I spent about 15 minutes trying to find a pair of tickets in various blocks, upper and lower, etc etc, the whole list is there but tickets not necessarily available for them. In the end I had to leave it blank and let them give me the seats they wanted to, somewhere up in the Gods on the wing. Supposedly NC has promised us a new proper website when we get promoted, but how difficult can it be to get a decent ticket system where you can see the seats available? I had a quick look at the Cardiff site a few months back, for example (when working out where us away fans were sitting) and on theirs you can zoom in and pick your exact seat, and see which ones are taken. How difficult can it be, I'm sure most clubs at this level and above have a better system, I don't think ours has changed for about 10 years. That aside, looking forward to it, will be nice to get revenge for the cup game at theirs, we would have walked that with a couple more first teamers, ho hum.
As with everything though, there are two sides to the issue. Of course, from a customer perspective it would be good to be able to personally pick your own seat when buying match tickets, but just say, for example, you're buying just the one ticket. By being able to personally select your seat, you might pick the middle seat of three empty seats. Clearly the club wont want this though, as they could no longer sell those three seats to a group of two or three. Moreover, they would rather you, as an individual, bought a ticket for a seat which already has people sitting either side of it (as only an individual would be able to sit there). That said though, it's clearly not perfect and improvements would be most welcome.
Our ticketing system and our ticket office are a complete joke. I have used many other clubs online systems around England and Europe and can safely say that ours is by far the worst. When away tickets go on sale to STH only, it will come up as Sold Out, even though it's only on restricted sale. Mainly due to the system not being able to cope. I also find that the £3 booking fee that comes with phoning up the ticket office for a ticket is ridiculous, especially as it's not your fault that the online system cannot be used for what it's meant. The sooner it's sorted the better.
