When I noticed the article published on Wednesday in the Santa Barbara Independent widely publicizing the S.B. Bowl’s warning that any transferred Paul McCartney tickets would not be honored, I was compelled to write an email to the Bowl.
The process for acquiring tickets was on the surface welcomed and well thought out; it promised the idea that tickets would be acquirable in a fair and equitable way. Many of my friends and colleagues entered the lottery; not all of us got an award.
However, the actual process on the morning of the ticket sale suggested that some automated or bot process was at work actively competing to secure a transaction. In short, once verified and entering the system, the ticket selections would disappear when making the actual commitment to transaction, forcing the user to reselect another set of two seats and be denied again. The competition for the seats was digitally working faster than the app or a human set of clicks. My experience was extremely disappointing as I was unable to actually transact and buy two tickets after at least 8-10 different selections, all in a 10-minute span of total time. I finally received a generated error message that the seats were no longer available.
While I continued to try, the error message eventually changed that there were no longer any tickets available. And I continued to try periodically through the day until the “purchase time frame” was over at 10 p.m. All of my friends who received a lottery award did not get tickets.
I sincerely implore you to deny entry to ticket holders that cannot show their matching identification, with a photo ID, for one of the two ticket holders. I would ask the Bowl to inform participants in the original lottery process how many lottery awarders have actually completed a purchase of a ticket (90%?, 80%?) to prove transparency in its methods. The process is very suspect or remains exposed to have your everyday fan and S.B. Bowl patron left on the sidelines because automated and coordinated ticket resellers have more sophisticated technologies that break through a well intended set of tools.
Your security tonight will have a difficult job for ticket holders who may have paid significantly for tickets who legitimately should be turned away. And you may risk a stadium that is not actually at capacity for what might be a historic evening. I hope you can bring these kinds of artists to the Bowl in the future. I just wish that locals can actually attend without extreme expense or extreme disappointment.
Elizabeth Orona is a local, a member of the Solvang City Council, and a Beatles fan.
