Saturday, April 4, 2009

F1 GP Tickets

The Formula 1 season ends this year on November 1st in Abu Dhabi. A brand new circuit is being build on Yas Island. Yas Island will also be home to a Ferrari theme park, a Warner Brothers theme park, 2 golf courses, lots of hotels, parks and residential areas. As an F1 fan, the prospect of being here for what could be a mouth watering conclusion to the season is very exciting (not particularly shared by Caz!). Caz had bought me tickets for the British GP last year, but we ended up coming out here before the event, so I sold the tickets on eBay!



I went online dead on 10am when the tickets went on sale. I got half way through the process to buy tickets and the site crashed. Typical! I tried again, same happened. So I phoned the ticket line. This was very painful. I must have repeated my name, address and email address details, by letter, about 10 times! AAgghh! For a major international event they could have had people manning the phone who could understand English better. At the end of the process he was going to bid me farewell when I thought I'd better ask for my booking reference number. He told me that would be issued on email to me. Right, I thought, I'd better just check that email address just one more time. By later that day I still had no email. I phoned and was told they would look into it. This was repeated a couple of hours later. When I phoned back again I asked to speak to a supervisor. He was in a meeting. They took my details again and said he would call back. Never did.



Now, by this time I was beginning to panic a little, as you may have read previously 2 of my brother had by now booked flights to come! I was hearing reports that grandstand tickets were selling out and I was praying that this wasn't all going to go t*ts up! I phoned my credit card company. Yes a transaction for the tickets value had been presented and accepted. Phew! At least that gave me a little more confidence! Anyway, to try and cut this long story short, I have since spoken to a supervisor 2 more times. Apparently a batch of orders failed to have an automatic confirmation sent out by email. These were being sent manually but would take some time. Their brand new system to sell c.100,000 tickets to the world, can only be searched by booking reference number - which I don't have! By Monday (it's now Sat) it will have been a week since I ordered my tickets and I will call them on the anniversary I think. I am working on the principle that they have taken my money for tickets, so they will have to provide me with tickets!.... or am I making the mistake of applying logic! Hmmm, we will see.............

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