Every year the NZIFF puts on an amazing International Film Festival in Wellington. The selection of films is great, and the venues are wonderful (although it is sad to lose Paramount late last year, and not have it part of the Festival; hopefully Reading is at least half as good a home for the NZIFF).
Unfortunately every year in the last 4 years that I have tried to buy tickets, the ticket purchasing website that NZIFF have chosen has either failed to cope with demand, or utterly failed to cope with demand. (The difference being whether it was possible to buy any tickets at all on the first morning.)
So far this year I have managed to pay for zero tickets, depsite trying for nearly two hours at this point (across two different web browsers, for a single film at a time in each attempt). Most attempts time out even before loading the first page from the ticketing site; some got part way through the process and then timed out.
For added excitement, a couple of ticket purchase attempts claimed my "order completed successfully" without taking any money -- and I am apparently not alone. When you try to "Print Tickets", it claims "your booking was successful but there was a problem creating your Print At Home Ticket" -- and tells you to print the confirmation and pick up your tickets at the counter. And no email is sent. So... maybe they are my seats? Maybe. That is an exciting new failure mode not seen in previous years. (I have already emailed the requested address with the relevant ticket confirmations, offering to pay for them, and got a reply back saying "I have printed that off for our friendly ticketing people to process as soon as they're off the current call", but it is still unclear if I should just try to buy more tickets once tickets are on sale again, or if the seats it claimed were mine will actually be mine if I pay for them.)
As with every previous year -- since NZIFF stopped using Ticketek -- an hour or so into the problem NZIFF's ticket vendor took ticket purchasing offline off for 45+ minutes to add more capacity. So perhaps they are also trying to clean out their database of failed attempts as well...
I am still left wondering why they did add (substantial!) additional capacity at 9:00 this morning (before ticket sales started), for the first day, rather than waiting until 11:00 this morning (after everyone had an hour of frustration). The ticket purchasing site has failed in pretty much the same way for multiple years -- my 2014, 2015, and 2017 experiences are basically all the same types of failures. At this point we are surely past the "no one could have predicted the demand" stage...
It is also puzzling that the ticketing website is still using exactly the same inefficient process as previous years -- none of the purchase flow optimisations I suggested last year seems to have been implemented, nor any other obvious technology improvements (eg, longer cache times for unchanging things, reduced requests, etc). Any of those potential changes that reduced the number of requests needing to be made to the central ticket server could have significantly increased the number of ticket sales it could have completed.
Clearly the NZIFF team is "really frustrated this has happened and greatly appreciate your patience", and honestly I do feel for them dealing with these problems every year. But there seems to be a pattern of being let down by the same vendor, year after year, in the same way -- apparently due to the vendor failing to plan in advance for the -- entirely expected -- rush of ticket purchases on day one. And that pattern of being let down also seems rather predictable at this point :-(
Hopefully I eventually get to buy the tickets to the 25+ sessions that I want to see, before all the good seats are gone. And the memory of the pain of ticket purchasing fades with the amazement at the films being shown.
ETA, 2018-07-05: Unsurprisingly the ticket sales worked much better after the ticket vendor had upgraded the ticket server to handle more capacity. Hopefully there will be a post mortem on this event when the question "why didn't you do that the day before?" is asked, and answered. I mostly seem to have even managed to get good to okay seats for all sessions, including the ones where I "ordered successfully" but got no tickets, and ended up just buying them again rather than waiting for the NZIFF staff to have time to process them when all the good seats were already gone.
When the server works properly the best process seems to be:
Save all the tickets you want into a logged in Wishlist
Have two browser sessions open, logged into that same Wishlist
Work down the Wishlist, one session at a time, booking the tickets, one session in each browser.
While one is stuck loading, swap over to the other one
Memmorise the good seats in the theatres you will be in, as you will have to pick a good seat every single time as the "best available seat" claim remains a complete lie. You also need to recognise when the page has reloaded after seat selection, as it displays the old seat for a long time after "done" on the seat selection, and anything entered there will be ignored.
Get very very good at typing in your name/email address/phone number, and postal address. As in minimal exact keystrokes good. (Firefox is better at assisting with this than Safari...)
Get very good at typing in your credit card details (again minimal keystrokes, from memory) as you will be doing that a lot too.
Proceed as quickly as you can, but do not be tempted to try reloading the pages -- they will either work, or timeout, and reloads will not help if the server is dying under load.
Keep a physical list of sesssions you want and tick them off by hand; the "ticketed" indicator on the Wishlist is misleading, as it just indicates "request sent to ticket server" and not "tickets available to print".
Double check you got everything, without duplicates, at the end before stopping.
Once again the ticket purchasing process took 3 hours, of which the first two hours were utter frustration and the last hour was fairly productive. Maybe next year the server upgrades can be done in advance and we can just have the single "fairly productive" hour.
ETA, 2018-08-07: Fortunately I seem to have managed to get reasonably good seats to most sessions, and the festival programme has been excellent: my first weekend, first week and second weekend have all had lots of films I was pleased to watch.
ETA, 2019-01-08: Reworded paragraph about ticketing being turned off to make it flow better.