CHENNAI: As the general sales of tickets for the non-India matches from the 2023 ICC Men's ODI World Cup opened on BookMyShow — the official ticketing platform — at 8 pm on Friday, the first-hand experience of trying to get hold of tickets wasn't a pleasant one for the fans.
Srinivas R, a fan from Chennai, had the website open on his computer as well as the app from 7.40 pm in an attempt to book tickets for the clash between Pakistan and Afghanistan to be played at the MA Chidambaram Stadium on October 23. As soon as the sale opened, he tried to select the venue and match but by the time he got there, the site seemed to have crashed.
"For half an hour, nothing was happening. It was showing 'something went wrong' or network error. Then, I left it for some time and I tried again. This time I selected Rs 2500 tickets and when I clicked the book icon, it said I booked two tickets and it was Rs 5,000. And beyond that I was not able to proceed," Srinivas told this daily. After almost an hour, when he tweeted about not being able to book, his friend, who was able to secure tickets for himself, reached out. Srinivas asked his friend to book whatever ticket was available and he eventually got one. "It's been almost 90 minutes. Most people generally give up unless you are very interested. I was planning to take my kid, that is why I wanted to get a ticket in a stand with a good view but now I am not so sure," he said.
Tareque Laskar from Bengaluru, however, wasn't that lucky. Trying to book tickets for Pakistan games against Australia and New Zealand. "Forget booking, I could not even get that far. When I selected the Australia-Pakistan game, Rs 1,000 tickets were sold out already, I moved to Rs 3,000 and decided to buy, selected seats and everything. Then I tried to go forward and some error came and it was completely gone.
Then I thought the Pak-NZ game would be easier, considering it is a day game, but when I got there it said the Rs 1,000 tickets were sold out and the Rs 3,000-5,000 ones were not even showing. Then I came back to the main page and went through the New Zealand team for the same match, but could not go there because the entire New Zealand page said 'it is coming soon'. Eventually, I gave up," said Laskar, who felt that a bigger problem is the lack of clarity on the number of tickets that have been made available. "It was a nightmare because anything you click is like a lottery and from a platform point of view, BookMyShow have their share of blame as well. At every point you do not know what went wrong," he said.
Other issues the fans this daily got in touch experienced were that some of them weren't able to select more than two seats, some were told they had exceeded the limit without even booking the tickets. They also felt that the costlier tickets opened up first and later lower denomination tickets appeared. Vinesh Prabhu, an ardent fan based out of Mumbai, managed to secure the Rs 2,000 tickets for the Australia versus England match in Ahmedabad on November 4 after 30 minutes of constant refreshing. "Now, 15 minutes later when I checked cheaper tickets were available for the same match. I have ordered for Rs 2,200 but now it is available for Rs 1,000. When you want to desperately book, you go for it, I could have saved money if I had known," said Vinesh.
While the tickets opened on Friday are just for non-India games, fans hope that when the India games go on sale later this week, the process would be better. "I don't know if they are releasing in batches. If they are, I think it is something that should be communicated. I don't get the incredible level of opaqueness or lack of transparency. We shall see. Hopefully, they might make more tickets available as they go along," said Laskar.