Edinburgh Fringe box office system goes titsup
No laughing matter
Posted in Management, 10th June 2008 15:09 GMT
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Comedy lovers hoping to get their hands on tickets to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe festival have lost their sense of humour after discovering the company’s box office system went titsup on Monday.
Tickets were supposed to be generally available to punters on 9 June, but festival organisers admitted today that they have been forced to suspend sales until problems with their computer system have been fixed.
A Fringe spokeswoman told El Reg that the organisers were “99 per cent confident” that tickets will be on sale at edfringe.com, via telephone and over the counter from 10am tomorrow morning (11 June).
“I can’t go into technical detail about the problems but I can tell you we hit a snag at the final stage of implementation,” she said.
Hundreds of comedy acts will play hickety pickety venues across Edinburgh at the Fringe festival. This year’s three-week stint runs from 3 to 25 August.
Glasgow-based Pivotal Integration Limited supplies box office software to the company, but it could not be reached this afternoon for an amusing anecdote comment about the cock-up. ®
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COMMENTS
Gilded Balloon's Website taking bookings.
I was able to book tickets on the Gilded Balloon's website. Worked a treat.
system platform?
linux? windows?
please provide details so i may scoff appropriately.
More fundamental problems...
Yup, there are some serious flaws in their IT strategy.
Take the Microsoft ticket tent they put up on the top of the Prince's Mall each year. You can't buy a ticket from the staff there -- you get to go on one of their computers and book one on the Fringe website.
All well and good -- but you need to confirm your email address, and there's no way to check your email from these computers. I signed up on their site in 2006 and last year tried to use the Ticket Tent, but I'd forgotten my password, which they dutifully sent to my hotmail account which I couldn't see!
Ridiculous!
Festival Dirty Tricks?
"Glasgow-based Pivotal Integration Limited supplies box office software to the company"
Pretty obvious what the problem is right there... Pivotal must support Glasgow's Comedy Festival rather than those dour east-coasters. :D

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