More than 30,000 queued in to try to get tickets today, but only a few got the chance as it sold out within 30 minutes. The official ticket master, Blueticket, is being criticised for choosing an unfair method to allocate who could buy.
It’s all gone. The first bunch of tickets made available for the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 in Lisbon are sold out. It took the fans less than 30 minutes to buy all of the available ones, but many were unsatisfied with the way Blueticket – the official ticketing website – handled the task.
Early this morning, Blueticket’s main page was replaced by a queueing system that would – at 11AM CET – randomly assign a number to each visitor, which didn’t take into consideration if someone was waiting for five hours or five minutes. The method has outraged many fans who made sure to raise their opinions on the company’s Facebook page.
“I think that you should change the system of giving the number in a random way. I’ve been waiting since 9:30am CET and I got 6,674. Other people who wait, for example, 10 minutes got 300…”
On top of that, after the tickets were gone, many fans were still queued in to get one. That left them confused on whether they should still be waiting or not: “What a terrible and inefficient ticketing system. I’m sitting here like an idiot and the website still says I’m on queue. You could at least update the website”, a fan wrote on their Facebook page. Blueticket’s main page was only updated roughly an hour after the sold out announcement.
Tickets for the golden circle along with its premium version – which includes early entry access plus a backstage tour – were the first ones to go followed by the main standing area.
During the first phase today, only standing tickets were made available, but on December 20th, when the second wave of tickets is put available for the final, all sort of tickets will be up for sale. Prices will vary between 35€ and 299€.
After the allocation draw – in January of 2018 – tickets for the two semi-finals will also be made available along with further waves that will be announced soon.
