Prom Planner - booking today....

[Petrushka]

Still not received e-mail confirmation and it's now over 90 minutes since successfully booking tickets. Checked with my bank and debit card payment has gone through. Can't tell me whether credit card payment was done or not and I presume it hasn't.

The RAH need to tidy up the anomaly with credit cards as I very nearly got timed out scrabbling around for my debit card to use instead.

[Cockney Sparrow]

The upside is that I have spent less than a third of my potential bill, on tickets for 2 concerts rather than 8. I shall spend some money on the best lightweight folding chair I can find and weather permitting, Prom for Rattle and Bychkov.

The booking process is lamentable, at the point where a seat number was quoted, the seat plan the RaH could provide was ludicrous - I know where the stalls are, thank you, and I know where the side stalls are (fairly large areas on either side??). I had to go to a 3rd party site to check my seats were acceptable. Really pathetic.

And next year I'll probably pass on Proms booking and make better use of an entire morning......

[Bert Coules]

If anyone is still looking, the best online seating plan I've found is here.

[Simon B]

This one can be handy zoomed in to max if you're in a hurry (before the &£$£ website kicks you out) and you have sharp eyesight: http://musicglue-profile-pages.s3.am...013/06/rah.png

[Simon B]

I've given up having got tickets for 3 of the 10 I was hoping for. Basically, I can't be bothered to waste any more time on it. I'll either pick something up nearer the time or go and sit in the sunshine we probably won't be having!

[Bert Coules]

After trying for three and a half hours, I'm now through on the phone to the box office and my call "will be answered by the next available booking agent". I've been in this happy state for twelve minutes. At the same time, I'm down to number 174 in the online waiting room queue. It's a race...

LATER...

Well, it's no longer a race. I was down to number 35 in the waiting room and then the page suddenly reset itself. Thanks a lot. Still hanging on on the phone, at seventeen minutes and rising...

[Petrushka]

it's now 2 and a half hours since booking tickets and I still haven't had e-mail confirmation. Am I right to be worried?

I had the booking confirmation after purchasing but so far had no e-mail.

[Nick Armstrong]

A very tedious process.

I've never even tried, and can't imagine I ever will - sounds ghastly. Can't stand booking systems where I don't feel in control of where I'm going to sit - above all, in Prince Albert's cavernous bathroom with comedy acoustics. I've always managed to pick up what I want by tactical booking / snapping up of returns nearer the time...

[Bert Coules]

Caliban, I agree. I've now been on hold for twenty minutes on the phone and am about to say to hell with the whole business.

[VodkaDilc]

it's now 2 and a half hours since booking tickets and I still haven't had e-mail confirmation. Am I right to be worried?

I had the booking confirmation after purchasing but so far had no e-mail.

I've just checked the time of my email and it was 9.23. Surely your bank can tell you if the transaction went through.

[Anastasius]

it's now 2 and a half hours since booking tickets and I still haven't had e-mail confirmation. Am I right to be worried?

I had the booking confirmation after purchasing but so far had no e-mail.

I wouldn't worry. I've not got mine either.

[Anastasius]

While doing something equally tedious in the garden (pruning the laurel) I've been pondering the RAH system. For starters, I think comparing it to other sites such as the ROH or South Bank is apples and pears. You're looking at potentially a very wide potential audience for tickets (much wider than that for the ROH, I would posit) plus a huge number of events, seats and venues.

So it comes down to bottlenecks in the system or rather trying to design a system that will spread the load and avoid any. I'm not an expert in booking systems so all this is from first principles. The first choke point is going to be logging on to the site. They've quite sensibly offloaded queue handling to the Waiting Room system. The horsepower required to manage the queue is going to be significantly less then that required for processing the Proms Planner (Processing System) and allocating and reserving seats. The payment system will be separate and either still inhouse or outsourced. It shouldn't be a problem but clearly it has been for some folk. I saw the name of the payment system flash up briefly and didn't recognise it.

Three building blocks.

Waiting Room ...the front-end is going to be connecting to our computer when we access the website. Just like any other website. But there will come a time when the waiting room is overloaded because too many people are trying to access it. Hence the Busy message and you don't even get into the Waiting Room. There could even be a bottleneck in the incoming data circuits and routers (but I doubt it). They could add more servers but would you want to know that you are number 23,667 in the queue? Would be fascinated to read the metrics on this.

The Processing System is where all the heavy-lifting is going on. It will have a finite capacity of Proms Planners to process at any one time. When it has spare capacity it will tell the waiting room to send a few more people through. Could it be beefed up with more servers? Possibly but possibly not. The chances are that it will have been built on a database or processing engine of some sort or other and there will be a finite limit to the number of people's requests it can handle. It might not even be possible for the system to span across several servers. What we are looking for is scalability. If the RAH IT department chose the wrong Processing 'engine' then they will be stuffed unless they redesign the system.

And now we come down to it. The demands on the RAH booking system for the first opening day of Proms booking is a bit like heavy snow at Heathrow. Yes, the RAH could re-invest heavily in more IT but why would they? It's a once a year occasion.

No idea if that helps or hinders.

[Dave2002]

And now we come down to it. The demands on the RAH booking system for the first opening day of Proms booking is a bit like heavy snow at Heathrow. Yes, the RAH could re-invest heavily in more IT but why would they? It's a once a year occasion.

No idea if that helps or hinders.

An interesting post - and really you're going in the direction that I'd hope the IT people would at least think about.

Re the booking for the first day of the Proms being like snow at Heathrow - that's not quite right, as there isn't always snow at Heathrow, whereas there is always a Proms season. Airports which regularly have snow do plan for it, and invest on a large scale.

My view is that much more can be done to spread out the processing load - for example over time - and that much more can be done in advance. It really isn'necessary to do everything in one day, and multiple queues can be used to spread the load. It has been suggested that popular concerts could be handled differently, though how would the system know which are popular. That's actually quite easy if most users go via the Prom Planner, as the requests could be analysed to determine the popular concerts. The Prom Planner might have to close earlier in order to facilitate that, but it would not be unreasonable.

Use could be made of Apps and programs downloaded on to end user machines. For example, why do I need to make multiple attempts to "enter" a waiting room. Even if the waiting room is full, would it not be possible for my first attempt to be logged, and then when the WR becomes less full, a prompt is then sent back to the App on my machine to notify it that at least the WR is now accessible. This might save network traffic if many people are trying repeatedly to access a full queue.

What is it that really holds things up anyway? Is it the payment details? Some of us maybe don't trust organisations to handle our payment details properly, but for those of us who do, why could we not give our payment details in advance, so that all the Proms Planner would have to do is to crunch through allocating seats and setting up payments, which could be done effectively offline? In any case, why does payment have to be linked directly to seat allocation? It would not be unreasonable in some systems to assume that I would be allocated a seat and would pay for it, so the payment processing could come later. There would obviously have to be a condition that if payment failed that the seat would not be sold, and either re-allocated, or the customer would be given one or two opportunities to correct any errors.

There are just so many ways that I think the RAH IT people could handle this better. Obviously this would require thought, but there are 30 months or so of the year when the Proms are not on which could usefully be used for development.

[Anastasius]

An interesting post - and really you're going in the direction that I'd hope the IT people would at least think about.

Re the booking for the first day of the Proms being like snow at Heathrow - that's not quite right, as there isn't always snow at Heathrow, whereas there is always a Proms season. Airports which regularly have snow do plan for it, and invest on a large scale.

My view is that much more can be done to spread out the processing load - for example over time - and that much more can be done in advance. It really isn'necessary to do everything in one day, and multiple queues can be used to spread the load. It has been suggested that popular concerts could be handled differently, though how would the system know which are popular. That's actually quite easy if most users go via the Prom Planner, as the requests could be analysed to determine the popular concerts. The Prom Planner might have to close earlier in order to facilitate that, but it would not be unreasonable.

Use could be made of Apps and programs downloaded on to end user machines. For example, why do I need to make multiple attempts to "enter" a waiting room. Even if the waiting room is full, would it not be possible for my first attempt to be logged, and then when the WR becomes less full, a prompt is then sent back to the App on my machine to notify it that at least the WR is now accessible. This might save network traffic if many people are trying repeatedly to access a full queue.

What is it that really holds things up anyway? Is it the payment details? Some of us maybe don't trust organisations to handle our payment details properly, but for those of us who do, why could we not give our payment details in advance, so that all the Proms Planner would have to do is to crunch through allocating seats and setting up payments, which could be done effectively offline? In any case, why does payment have to be linked directly to seat allocation? It would not be unreasonable in some systems to assume that I would be allocated a seat and would pay for it, so the payment processing could come later. There would obviously have to be a condition that if payment failed that the seat would not be sold, and either re-allocated, or the customer would be given one or two opportunities to correct any errors.

There are just so many ways that I think the RAH IT people could handle this better. Obviously this would require thought, but there are 30 months or so of the year when the Proms are not on which could usefully be used for development.

Not necessary to do everything in one day? What do you mean by that? Can you give some examples of what you think might be kept over to another day or how it would work as I'm confused.

Handling popular concerts differently wouldn't work. What if you have requested tickets for popular concert A but also not-so popular concerts B and C? Too complicated to fiddle about tying to resolve that IMO.

I like the idea of them ringing back. The only problem being that you still have to get into the system and as we have seen many people got the busy signal. And to be honest I'd far rather be in control. The analogy is waiting in for a delivery. Or wondering if something has gone wrong with the system and they've lost your details.

I don't think it is the payment details...could be..we don't know enough. If the RAH opted for payment system X because the cost per transaction was cheaper then ..... Same argument goes for the system that delivers the Prom bookings. Allocating a seat and then wondering if the customer is going to pay is a recipe for business disaster. It's a crazy idea. Also from the customers point of view.

I'm interested in your 30 month calendar !

[Bert Coules]

I've now tried four times to book through the website. On each occasion I went down in the queue to a number in the thirties and then the connection was reset. The whole thing is just ridiculous.