Ticketek; Pure stupidity

Tuesday August the 28th, the day when the week 1 AFL Finals tickets went on sale. Well were meant to. The 2 games at the MCG and 1 at the SCG were being sold using Ticketek, notorious for being slow, buggy and crash prone at finals time.

At 9am was the ‘open’ time to buy tickets to Richmond vs Hawthorn, Melbourne vs Geelong and Sydney vs GWS Giants. Sure enough like every past year it went wrong. The system was actually turned off that’s how bad it went, with the sales to resume a day later at staggered times ^source.

Ticketek poor planning on show for all

The simple issue was Ticketek didn’t stagger the ticket release times, so the load came at the same time. A disaster that simply wasn’t figured out by those at Ticketek.

Richmond has 100,000 members, Hawthorn 80,000, Geelong 63,000 Sydney 60,000 and Melbourne 44,000 add all those up you have 347,000 without knowing the exact number or percent that tried to get tickets at 9am on the 28th if we get 50% that makes it 173,500 trying to get tickets across 3 games ^{membership numbers}.

That number should be easy to scale for with a web application. Consider the fact that Ticketek knew there would be high demand at this time why did they not rapidly scale up for a few hours? That is poor planning and strategy. After the fact they decided to release them all at the same time, stupid.

Whilst the drama was going on the AFL couldn’t do anything, Ticketek is contracted to the MCG and SCG and if they were serious issues around finals tickets would never happen again. It’s not rocket science to scale up and scale down infrastructure and stagger release times to reduce load. I don’t wanna know how much the person is paid that should have realized this.

I cannot wait till this time in 2019 to see A. if Ticketek is still the ticket seller and B. if they fail at the process again.