Fans of the award-winning musical Hamilton have taken to social media to voice their unhappiness with the pre-sale ticketing process ahead of the acclaimed Broadway show’s Middle East premiere in Abu Dhabi next year.
Pre-sale tickets went live on Friday at 11am for those who pre-registered through Etihad Arena’s website. However, many people have since complained they have been facing problems getting through to actually purchase them.
“It’s been a mess. I’ve been trying since 11am. Every time it’s my turn to get tickets I click on confirm and get the error message,” commented an Instagram user under Etihad Arena’s Hamilton post.
Another frustrated user wrote: “Such a terrible experience to purchase these tickets. Twice been in the queue and still couldn’t checkout. The site keeps crashing.”
“Not at all what I expected and it’s made me rethink buying any tickets!”
While a number of people have expressed their frustration because the website keeps crashing at every stage of the booking process, others have said they have been waiting in an online queue to purchase tickets for hours only for their queue number to get rejected or for the website to crash.
“This might be the fifth time on the queue now,” Arianna Espinosa Valdez tells The National.
Valdez, who has been waiting for more than four hours to purchase tickets, explains that in her previous attempts she received error messages and was unable to continue, causing her to have to close the website and then log back in.
“Sometimes there is no error message but there is no button to continue,” she says. “It’s frustrating because I was very excited to go to the show. I thought I was going to get first-hand access to the show, but now there is uncertainty. First of all, will I get the tickets? And second of all what kind of tickets will I get?”
Some Hamilton fans were able to purchase tickets but were confused and faced challenges in the process. Dubai resident Hamsah Ryburn tells The National how she was able to get out of the queue only to experience issues when it came to selecting seats.
“I got an email at 11.03am from Platinumlist letting me know that pre-sale tickets were now available to purchase. I would pick the date I wanted and it would show all these tickets that were available,” she says.
“But when I would pick the seats, as soon as I would click one of them, it would say ‘no longer available’ or all ‘these seats are gone’. It would keep happening no matter what seat I picked.”
Ryburn also said that when she first logged on to her Platinumlist account she saw on the top of the screen that there were more than 3,000 users attempting to buy tickets at the same time.
“At every stage the site kept saying something went wrong, even when I would try to pay,” she adds. “I gave up and assumed that all the tickets were sold out. But then I got the text message from my bank saying that a purchase has been made but there was no confirmation on the website.”
Ryburn did however later receive an email from Etihad Arena with confirmation that she had purchased the tickets.
“It was all very confusing and I was concerned that maybe I had paid once or twice, since the payment went through despite the site telling me that something had gone wrong,” she says.
Valdez, on the other hand, says she will keep trying to purchase tickets and she hopes it will work, though believes it unlikely.
“I don’t know exactly what happened from a technical perspective but clearly there’s an issue with their website,” she says.
“They should have worked better and prevented this from happening. Obviously they expected a huge amount of people joining so what they could have done, is make sure the system would support the number of people joining and you wouldn’t have people waiting for over four hours.”
Etihad Arena’s Instagram account has been responding to complaints, apologising for the many technical issues.
“We apologise for the inconvenience caused. We are working on resolving the issue as soon as possible and we will send you a direct message shortly!” they wrote.
The National has reached out to Etihad Arena for comment.
Updated: May 19, 2023, 12:50 PM