When I finally decided to go to Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to see the legendary Sondheim's best musical Into The Woods, I didn't expect there were many seats left when it was only ten days before the performance. However, I was surprised. And in two ways.
First, there were seats scattering in all price range across the auditorium. It was a celebration of Sondheim's 80th birthday and the show marked the end of the 2010 season of the Park, isn't it odd not seeing a SOLD OUT sign sealing out the booking system? Any way, I clicked on two best seats without the least hesitation, but I soon found out why...
It was a blank of three seats in a row but I just wanted two. This is just a very typical booking requirement that happens every day at every theatre, but the Open Air's system just won't allow me to do it. 'All right,' I thought, 'for the sake of Into The Woods, I'll call.' 'Such a cunning way of earning a booking fee,' I grumbled, but hoped that by sacrificing a small fortune I could eventually get what I wanted. Then again, I was wrong.
Ridiculously, the booking assistant said she couldn't book me those seats either, because they had got the same system in front of them! What another surprise. The seats were there, but just couldn't be booked! According to the assistant, the only way for me to have the tickets was to buy all three seats, and thanks to the strict weather policy at Open Air the ticket I didn't want was non-refundable (40 bloody pounds per ticket...).
Now, set aside the justifications (or unjustifications rather!!) of such a system setting, given that I did go to that performance, there's the trick of how I finally got away with the system setting and booked my tickets:
1. Open your secondary browser (Internet Explorer in my case), and click on the seat you DON'T want. No worries, you're not paying any bit at this time.
2. Proceed to check out, but when seeing the ticket inside your basket, stop. The idea is to keep this seat reserved by the system for a period of time (normally 3 - 6 minutes) without actually buying it, and thus creating the chance to bypass the system barrier to get the seats we want.
3. Open up your primary browser (mine being Chrome) and go to the booking page. You'll be happy to see now that there lies two vacant seats perfectly for your selection. And they are definitely clear to be booked.
3.1 (oops) If you don't have two browsers on your computer, and if you try the above steps in two different tabs on IE, you'll probably find yourself end up with having all three tickets meeting up again in your basket. In this case, it'll take you a small extra technique to solve the problem. Because the booking system uses cookies to identify the same user and remember what's already in the basket, after putting the first ticket into the basket you have to find out where your browser store the cookie and delete it. It is usually stored under the folder named openairtheatre.org, find it, delete all the stuffs inside. Or if you can't find it, just simply click on the erase all cookies button in your browser. Then when you pick the tickets you actually want, only them, hopefully, will lie in your basket. (Don't worry for the dummy ticket, it will appear available again form the mythical ether space some moments later.)
3.2 For those who are less interested in following the technical detail above, just ask one of your friends to reserve the dummy ticket for you :-)
Had the dummy ticket been sold at last to somebody else that night? No.
My friend stared at the empty seat next to us with a small seance of guiltiness during the interval, but actually it was not the only empty seat. To my straight forward West End understanding, if a show is a sell-out show itself, it will sell out to the very last standing mezzanine ticket; if it's not such kind of a show, advertising or half-pricing or rush-ticketing or whatever it does, there will still be empty seats in the stalls. That's just how the theatre works. So instead of trying to scheme the potential audience into buying more tickets just to prevent the minor odd seats, why not treat those real theatre supporters better by taking the hassle out of booking? That may well in contrast get the last tickets sold.
Ridiculously, the booking assistant said she couldn't book me those seats either, because they had got the same system in front of them! What another surprise. The seats were there, but just couldn't be booked! According to the assistant, the only way for me to have the tickets was to buy all three seats, and thanks to the strict weather policy at Open Air the ticket I didn't want was non-refundable (40 bloody pounds per ticket...).
Now, set aside the justifications (or unjustifications rather!!) of such a system setting, given that I did go to that performance, there's the trick of how I finally got away with the system setting and booked my tickets:
1. Open your secondary browser (Internet Explorer in my case), and click on the seat you DON'T want. No worries, you're not paying any bit at this time.
2. Proceed to check out, but when seeing the ticket inside your basket, stop. The idea is to keep this seat reserved by the system for a period of time (normally 3 - 6 minutes) without actually buying it, and thus creating the chance to bypass the system barrier to get the seats we want.
3. Open up your primary browser (mine being Chrome) and go to the booking page. You'll be happy to see now that there lies two vacant seats perfectly for your selection. And they are definitely clear to be booked.
3.1 (oops) If you don't have two browsers on your computer, and if you try the above steps in two different tabs on IE, you'll probably find yourself end up with having all three tickets meeting up again in your basket. In this case, it'll take you a small extra technique to solve the problem. Because the booking system uses cookies to identify the same user and remember what's already in the basket, after putting the first ticket into the basket you have to find out where your browser store the cookie and delete it. It is usually stored under the folder named openairtheatre.org, find it, delete all the stuffs inside. Or if you can't find it, just simply click on the erase all cookies button in your browser. Then when you pick the tickets you actually want, only them, hopefully, will lie in your basket. (Don't worry for the dummy ticket, it will appear available again form the mythical ether space some moments later.)
3.2 For those who are less interested in following the technical detail above, just ask one of your friends to reserve the dummy ticket for you :-)
Had the dummy ticket been sold at last to somebody else that night? No.
My friend stared at the empty seat next to us with a small seance of guiltiness during the interval, but actually it was not the only empty seat. To my straight forward West End understanding, if a show is a sell-out show itself, it will sell out to the very last standing mezzanine ticket; if it's not such kind of a show, advertising or half-pricing or rush-ticketing or whatever it does, there will still be empty seats in the stalls. That's just how the theatre works. So instead of trying to scheme the potential audience into buying more tickets just to prevent the minor odd seats, why not treat those real theatre supporters better by taking the hassle out of booking? That may well in contrast get the last tickets sold.
boo... to the system
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