Edinburgh Festival Fringe faces ticket chaos after further system breakdown

Published Monday 21 July 2008 at 11:30 by Thom Dibdin

Full coverage of the Edinburgh Festivals

Tens of thousands of tickets to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe remain in limbo following a further failure of the organisation’s box office system.

After serious problems with the newly-installed technology earlier this month, organisers had been due to start sending out advance tickets last week. But fringe bosses took the decision on Wednesday to stop attempting to mail out tickets purchased through the fringe website, edfringe.com.

An emergency meeting of the fringe board was held on Friday to inform members of what actions would be taken.

Fringe spokesman Duncan Fraser told the Stage, “Right now the basic problem is that ticket printing is too slow. We can get tickets out of the system, but it is just not quick enough at the moment. One hundred and fifty thousand tickets have been sold but that could be for any period [of the fringe]. I don’t have an accurate figure of what needs to go out for week one, but you would imagine it would be in the tens of thousands.”

Fringe organisers held crisis meetings will all venues over the weekend, to discuss how each one wishes to address the problem. Those with their own online ticketing systems will require different help from those which rely completely on edfringe.com for online and advance sales.

All counter and telephone ticket sales were suspended for 48 hours on Sunday so that staff could concentrate on the problem.

Despite opening for sales more than a week late, in excess of 150,000 tickets have already been sold through edfringe.com - 10,000 down on this time last year. The mail-out failure will not affect those who have purchased tickets on a “care of box office” basis, or through the websites of individual fringe venues.

With some users of edfringe.com reporting errors such as misleading confirmation prompts, the fringe sent an email of frequently asked questions to all customers on Thursday, promising to inform them this week of collection arrangements for tickets.

A similar email went to fringe performers, warning them, “Full ticket sales reports that were due yesterday are currently unavailable and we are working as hard as we can to resolve this issue.”

In a statement, EFF director, Jon Morgan promised that the fringe will run as planned and apologised for the inconvenience to customers and partners.

He said: “It will be challenging, but by working with the 247 venues involved, we will be able to ensure that ticketing services can be delivered for the fringe.

“Bookings already made through the fringe box office for shows will be fulfilled, and buyers who are currently expecting tickets will be contacted next week with information on ticket collections. For those who are yet to book, we will be providing information as soon as possible about how to get tickets.”