The sale of tickets for the Festival d’été de Québec (FEQ) brought forward to 11 a.m. on Wednesday, left thousands unhappy who learned the news too late, when two hours would have been enough for all the passes to find takers. .
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“It’s really ordinary to change the sales process on the same day. If I had known, I would have taken more steps forward. I arrive at 11:15 a.m. and there are already 140,000 people in front of me…” lamented Nathalie Côté on social networks.
There are hundreds of comments like this one under a publication from the FEQ which announced that the ticket office would exceptionally open an hour earlier, Wednesday morning. “Your enthusiasm yesterday for obtaining passes convinced us to relax our purchasing process!”, we could read on the organization’s Facebook page, barely 30 minutes before the sale.
- Listen to the response of the CEO of the Quebec Summer Festival, Nicolas Racine, at the microphone of Yasmine Abdelfadel via QUB :
The FEQ virtual ticket office therefore opened “gradually” from 11 a.m., instead of noon, for the purchase of the general admission pass. However, it was a “blind” purchase since the festival program was only revealed at noon.
“What happens is that we have all kinds of systems in place to counter robots and all the things that we don’t want to have in our process. […] We open quietly to ensure the proper functioning of our systems,” explained the CEO of the event, Nicolas Racine.
A flaw exploited
As soon as the queue opened, some found themselves behind no less than 100,000 “visitors” to the website in the hope – very slim – of obtaining their pass.
“Professional resellers are not a problem for the Summer Festival given the tools we have in place. We analyzed all the transactions [de l’année dernière]», affirms Mr. Racine.
Gold, The newspaper spoke with people who managed to obtain more than a dozen passes – when the allowed limit was 4 – by exploiting a loophole in the system.
After paying for the tickets, the customer simply had to return to the previous page and re-enter their information to proceed with another transaction.
Upset by the turn of events, some fans of the event even spoke of the possibility of organizing a class action.
“I am subscribed to the FEQ email, I have received […] none this morning to alert me of the change. The fact remains that all the people who thought that the sale started at noon are suffering harm,” indicates Stéphane Villeneuve, who launched the idea of the appeal.
All tickets sold
At 1:05 p.m., a message appeared on the web page where tens of thousands of people were still waiting in line, indicating that all the tickets had been sold.
“The unprecedented enthusiasm and the increasing volume of people in the waiting room prompted us to open the ticket office at 11 a.m. to ensure the smoothest running of the sale. We understand your dissatisfaction with this last minute change, this decision was the most prudent in the circumstances,” we could read on the queue page.
This means that all the passes were gone in barely two hours, like last year. On Tuesday, the 20,000 tickets posted for pre-sale were sold out in just 5 minutes.
For their part, those who hoped to turn to the resale of passes on sites like Billets.ca risk also being disappointed since the website seems to be experiencing hiccups. Although it displays many passes between $199 and $345, they disappear as soon as you select them, making them impossible to purchase.
– With the collaboration of Cédric Bélanger and Kathryne Lamontagne