Ticketing is a hard problem. Especially for one-off events, where scarcity is a much bigger issue. Both in theory (eg, finding optimal seats, while others are also doing so) and practice (eg, massive peak in load up front, increasingly impatient customers).

The NZIFF, which has run a Film Festival in Wellington for more than 20 years, tried something different this year -- changing from a large established ticketing vendor (Ticketek) with multiple physical offices, to "doing it themselves" in a tiny booth in one of the theatres, and doing online bookings themselves.

This year, fearing hugely overworked in-person staff on the first day, I tried online booking for the first time (safe in the knowledge that my printer works again). It... sort of worked.

The "wishlist" feature was great including specific screenings of specific films -- and a lifesaver when the rest of the ticketing process went badly (especially choosing to create an account to save that wishlist over "devices" -- browsers).

Ticketing opened at 09:00 on 2014-07-01 (and seemed to open very close to on time), and I went straight to purchasing all my pre-selected tickets. Unfortunately just after tediously selecting my ticket type for every film (the same for each one, but in a different order on each one -- WTF)... the process ground to a halt, with errors like this one:

Error 503 backend read error

backend read error
Guru Meditation:

XID: 2624998224

Varnish cache server

which means the frontend caching server didn't wait long enough, or the backend server was overloaded. Probably something you'd want to tune for longer on a ticketing backend. (I definitely wasn't alone.) After a few minutes of that NZIFF twittered that they'd be "back shortly", and then about 13 minutes after ticketing opened that ticketing currently isn't available through the website. Shortly afterwards they twittered that it was back again, and indeed it was.

While looking for clues for what was going wrong, I found a note from yesterday that Ticketmaster can only handle 10 sessions at once -- in reply to someone in Auckland (I assume) having trouble. Probably something to have thought about in advance if you're going to advertise:

Online Discount

Purchase ten Full Price tickets or more in one online transaction
and qualify for a discount of $2 per ticket.

There was no indication if they'd fixed that or not, but it seemed a plausible thing to be failing. So after more failures, I switched from Firefox to Safari (to drop my session state), and tried again in two batches (of 10 tickets and 9 tickets). (And fortunately it turns out that the Film Society tickets don't get a further discount, so other than the hassle of two payments, I was not unduly disadvantaged by that. NZIFF confirmed by email around 10:30 that they had fixed the problem now.)

My two sets of bookings went through around 9:30 give or take a few minutes. The first one was relatively smooth, redirecting to the payment confirmation site and back to the tickets quickly. The second one timed out the first time, just before the payment stage, but refreshing managed to get back to the confirmation page so I could carry on -- and it went through on the second attempt. (Fortunately they used DPS to take payments, on the DPS site, so at least one can be fairly confident about the credit card payments.)

Sadly -- and unlike booking in person with Ticketek previously -- there was no choice of seats at all. Some of the seats are pretty reasonable. But others are barely in the same postal district as the screen. Apparently "seats are allocated on the basis of best available seats at the time of purchase" -- but even booking within half an hour of sales opening does not seem to have really worked. My guess is either (a) they reserved all the better/closer to the screen seats for insiders (which, eg, happened at the live performance screening last year -- I found out because there were a bunch untaken, and I got moved into one of them), or (b) whoever wrote their seat selection algorithm likes to sit in a very different place to me. (I do like to be able to see the screen -- 2nd row or 5th row, depending on the theatre, is often good.)

Oh well. At least I have tickets to the screening times I wanted. And didn't have to drive in/queue up. Hopefully I won't hate the seats too much when it comes time to see the movies. And it's not entirely clear to me whether there'd have been any choice of seating locations if I'd booked in person. Or if it'd still have been the same "any seat you want so long as it's this one".

Prospective ticketing vendors note: different people like different seats. In different venues. It's really not a "one size fits all" problem. If you're going to offer a choice of seats via one method and not via another method you need to make that clear. And if you're not going to offer any choice of seats, at least be up front about it rather than pretending it's the "best available". Oh, and plan for a significant spike in usage right when you open ticket sales -- 10-100 times base usage seems quite likely.

ETA, 2014-08-24: Now that the Festival is (well) over, my hunch that my seats were definitely not ideal was defintely proved true. For around a third of the films I could find better seats still unsold when the movie was screened (and where practical I moved into them just as the film started).

I also learnt that people buying tickets after me had been given better (eg, more central) seats -- many of the seats I was allocated were either directly on the edge aisles, or very nearly on the aisle. Seat allocators really need to learn that "aisle seat" just isn't the draw card in a movie theatre, with aisles at the edges, that it might be in a long plane flight and an urgent need for the bathroom...

At the start of the month I did email the Festival (general contact email) to ask that their seating allocations be less sub-optimal in future (eg, allocate more central seats first!), and to ask if there was any way to choose seats when booking. Since they have not replied at all in the interveening three weeks, I do not know if they plan to do any better next year. But I sure hope so. In the absence of specific evidence to the contrary I think I will have to book in person again next year and beg to be given better seats. (Although I was told this year that they managed to get through about two people in the first 40 minutes of in-person ticket booking. Which validated my decision to book online.)

ETA, 2014-08-25: And just the morning after I wrote that I'd not heard back (above), I did get a reply from the Film Festival, acknowledging my email. They say that they are going to be working closely with the developers of the new ticketing service and aim to "improve the seat allocation programmes in the new system for next year". So I remain hopeful it'll be better next year.