Opinion: Waiting 10 hours should only happen at Disneyland
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At 9:20 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 17, senior Madison Bozzo received confirmation that her ticket for the Colorado vs. Oregon football game that Saturday was claimed and ready for use.
The tickets were supposed to be available at 11 a.m. that morning.
For over 10 hours, Bozzo dealt with online queues and app glitches –– and she’s not alone. According to waitlist numbers on the app that day, thousands of other UO students also waited hours to claim their ticket to the much-anticipated Top-25 matchup.
“I was so frustrated,” Bozzo said. “I couldn’t believe I had to wait [so long].”
It was only after calling Ticketmaster customer service that night that she was able to get a code to bypass the waitlist and claim her ticket.
Bozzo, along with many other students, uses the Ducks Sports Pass to claim her student tickets. The pass, which costs roughly $125, is run through the Go Ducks Gameday app and provides students with tickets to many sports games, including football. However, tickets are not automatically provided. Instead, students are given “priority access” to claiming theirs at a designated time before the game, according to their website.
For the average sporting event this often isn’t an issue. However, things can get complicated when attempting to claim tickets to games for our No. 9 AP poll ranked football team.
Tickets claimed through a Ducks Sports Pass are run through a UO email-connected Ticketmaster account. However, Ticketmaster, the largest ticketing services provider in the country, is no stranger to problems with its service.
Over the past couple years, fans have reported issues with buying tickets through the service — most recently for Taylor Swift’s ongoing Eras Tour. The website crashed multiple times when various Swift tickets were released; ticket sales had to be put on hold until problems were resolved, according to CNN Business.
The problems even sparked a Senate hearing with Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, earlier this year.
The Ducks Sports Pass, likely due to its use of Ticketmaster, has proven to be unreliable, and the Colorado game is just the most recent example.
“I [often] set aside entire Sundays to claim a ticket,” junior Bradley Buchbinder, a three-year purchaser of the Ducks Sports Pass, said. “There’s a large amount of stress [with the process].”
Currently, students are forced to use an often glitch-ridden system with hours-long online waitlists for tickets to see their fighting ducks play in Autzen Stadium. But not only is this system unprofessional, it’s just unnecessary.
No. 2 ranked University of Michigan, a college football “blue blood,” takes a more traditional approach to student tickets. According to their website, Michigan football tickets become available as a season package for current students to purchase in March. Incoming freshmen can buy the tickets beginning in June.
“[After purchasing the season-long package] you get a ticket that loads into your Apple wallet, and then the barcode just changes for every game,” Michigan freshman Naomi Barkan said. “It automatically updates and you don’t have to redownload your ticket each time, which is really cool.”
Michigan students can also get a student ticket for a visiting friend by “validating” the extra ticket at the Michigan Athletics Ticket Office. Ducks Sports Pass owners, on the other hand, must use the same faulty claiming system for extra tickets — ones that aren’t always available.
After its decision to move from the Pac-12 to the Big 10, it’s already clear that UO is prioritizing making money over its athlete’s education and well being. Its choice to use a weekly student ticket claiming system shows that the university’s monetary priority extends to fans and their experience as well.
The fix for UO is simple: it must switch to a model similar to its soon-to-be conference opponent Michigan. But the beauty of this is that UO already uses this model to release its Sports Pass. Students already buy the pass on a single drop date, just as Michigan students buy their season tickets. In the future, when students buy the Ducks Sports Pass, the process should send the tickets over at the time of the purchase.
Ticketmaster has proven to make the Ducks Sports Pass unreliable, and limiting user experience with the app is much better than the current alternative.
Having students wait 10 hours to claim a student ticket for a home game is disrespectful to them and their time. At the end of the day, it simply doesn’t make sense to have to wait any amount of time to claim a ticket that has already been paid for.