Some Vikings and Browns fans had a rough go of it on Sunday in London. Before kickoff at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, some ticket holders were left stuck outside due to a reported malfunction of the OnePass ticketing app, as relayed by Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk. The culprit? Ticketmaster, which "powers" the app.
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On Monday, Ticketmaster issued an apology and announced that affected fans would receive partial refund "credits." According to the Associated Press, Ticketmaster sent some customers a 50 percent credit for the face value of their tickets, blaming what it called a "ticketing issue." Neither Ticketmaster nor the NFL disclosed how many fans were impacted.
"The experience fell short of our standards and the service we aim to deliver on behalf of the NFL," the company wrote in an email to affected customers.
The partial refund can be applied toward tickets for this Sunday's Broncos-Jets game. Otherwise, the amount will be turned into a Ticketmaster gift card to use for future events. Translation: this isn't a refund. It's a coupon. The only way to benefit is to spend more money with Ticketmaster.
In a joint statement, the NFL and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium operations said they were able to verify ticket holders using secondary methods, and that "the situation was addressed as efficiently as possible and all fans entered the stadium safely."
That's fine, but it shouldn't have happened in the first place. Back when tickets were actual tickets, glitches like this didn't strand people outside stadium gates. Now that it's all digital, Ticketmaster and similar companies can more easily control the entire process, collect fees at every step, and shrug when their tech fails.
The company should be issuing full refunds in real dollars, not gift cards. Fans paid for access to the entire game. If Ticketmaster's technology prevented that, they should get their money back. All of it.
