Booking Opens Today!

[PhilipT]

Poor catering facilities at the RAH. Surely not!

Lord Mersey

Greetings, My Lord! It seems the RAH catering providers have changed again, this time to Rhubarb, so they'll start with a clean slate this year. It wouldn't be right to post it here, but any personal friends who want sight of the e-mail I had from last year's Catering Manager in response to my complaint about the cutlery in the Arena Foyer Bar have only to ask. The RAH is supposed to be the nation's village hall; providing diners with metal forks and plastic knives would disgrace the lowliest village hall in the country.

Philip

[Lord Mersey]

Philip

I am very reliably informed that the standard of cutlery provided by the Royal Opera House is of much superior quality. This is particularly so when sharing an ice cream!

Lord Mersey

[NickWraight]

Given that the RAH ticket system is only put under severe pressure once a year for a few hours (8 weeks concerts on sale all at the same time) I am not surprised the ticketing system has not been "improved" to just take this brief period into account.

I can appreciate that to be able to pick specific seats would be useful but think of the additional time this would take per booking and the computer power required.

One point it would be interesting to have comments on is the Booking Fee of 2% plus £1. Given that the Proms Planner ensures the purchaser prepare their concerts in advance, inccluding picking the seating area, I would assume there is little or no human input to the process until the tickets are posted - where there is a measurable cost. Also, think of the time taken for the queue to come round to your turn and the purchaser pays for this privilege!

Paradoxically, if you buy the tickets at the RAH Box Office the purchaser occupies the time of a staff member for as long as required but no Booking Fee is levied.

[David Underdown]

Quite, and the booking fee is now considerably higher than when they actually had to shuffle all the paperwork and key the information from the forms into the system themselves. Still, for the moment they still have to manually stick the photos onto the season tickets and write the names on themselves (why we can't just upload a jpeg and they produce the ticket all in one I don't know - they must already have all the tech in house for producing ID cards)

[Eudaimonia]

Poor catering facilities at the RAH. Surely not!

Oh, I never had any trouble personally--but then, maybe I wasn't paying attention closely enough. However, nobody who was there can deny that Mr. T had a most unfortunate string of bad service; you'd almost think they were doing it on purpose when they saw him coming.

Oh well-- here's to clean slates and fresh starts!

[Hilaryjane]

I had major issues this time. I was away for the weekend and had to borrow a friend's laptop. I didn't get online until 9.30 am, and there were over 5,000 in the queue. After nearly 2 hours, I got to the site, gave my email address and password, but when I went to log in, I got thrown off the site, and my friend had to shut down his laptop because the screen was frozen. I then spent 40 minutes waiting to speak to someone at the box office to complain. Having said that, when I did manage to speak to the box office, I got my season ticket booked in five minutes. I probably should have phoned up instead of trying to book my ticket online!

[LHC]

I'm surprised that they haven't followed the Opera House's tactic of spreading demand over a few days, particularly as the queuing system was pioneered by the Opera House.

It would seem sensible to have the season tickets sold on one day, with the tickets for individual proms going on sale a few days later. As it is, two sets of people attempting to make very different sorts of bookings are forced into the same queue at the same time.

[Lord Mersey]

I booked in person at the RAH and was finished by 9:10am. Saved the booking fee and also did not have to constantly hit the re-dial button on the phone unlike last year.

Eudaimonia
My comment about the catering was tinted with a slight hint of sarcasm.

Lord Mersey.

[David Underdown]

LHC

possibly but even season ticket holders will often by buying at least some chamber or Saturday matinee tickets in addition. Doubtless you'd then get charged two booking fees.