Unison.ie
Wednesday May 25th 2005
BRITISH fans hoping to see their idol Bruce Springsteen in Dublin last night were left out in the cold after an internet ticket site failed to deliver their tickets.
Hours before the Boss was to take to the stage at the Point, irate concert-goers who booked and paid for their tickets through British-based internet site londonticketshop.co.uk were told the firm was in the midst of a legal battle and that the High Court in London had served an injunction on it.
Customer service staff then told fans to "try a tout" outside the Point as this was the only way they would get in. Jakki Beedham from Leeds told the Irish Independent she had paid the internet firm almost €600 for a pair of standing tickets - over eight times their cover price. "We'll probably have to pay a lot more than even that for the touts but I'd rather pay over the odds than miss seeing him. He's not just a man, he's a religion," she said, pointing to her Springsteen tattoo.
Ms Beedham and her partner Alan cancelled their summer holiday to scrape together the money to afford the tickets and were first told by the internet site that the tickets would be sent to their home within 3-5 days of the concert.
"I was waiting on hold for 45 minutes before I was told that the tickets would be sent to our hotel instead. When we got to the hotel this morning there were no tickets. I phoned the ticket office again and a woman said that, due to the injunction, there would be no tickets given out for anything.
"She said we'd get a cheque in the post but what use is that to us now that we're here in Ireland having paid for flights, hotels and got the time off work? We're not just fans, our lives revolve around Bruce."
Englishman John Tarrant, who camped at the Point from early yesterday afternoon in the hope of getting a ticket, also got burned by the internet site.
He said he had been told there was a "delay" in getting tickets to purchasers here. First in the queue of fans last night was Stephen Southam from Belfast, proudly clutching his front row ticket. "A friend offered me stg£1,000 for it but I couldn't sell it. These tickets are like gold-dust and I follow Bruce everywhere."
Springsteen's solo and acoustic show at the Point was one of the most eagerly anticipated concerts to be held in Ireland this year, with all 5,000 tickets selling out within three minutes of going on sale last month.
A spokesperson for Aiken Promotions said the people behind londonticketshop were "internet touts" and speculated on whether they ever had any tickets for the concert in the first place .
"They're touts and unfortunately that means that these people have no recourse at all. If they had booked through Ticketmaster at least then we could find their seat numbers."
Breda Heffernan
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