As if, at this stage, you could have expected anything any different, following the complete mess that Glastonbury Festivals Limited, Aloud, and the Wayahead box office (See tickets) managed to make of selling tickets to this year’s Glastonbury festival, dealing with the aftermath of their inadequate ticketing system, and making coherent, sensible announcements to the ticket buying public, it now looks rather like they have managed to completely stuff up the whole ticket ID system as well.
I received my tickets this morning, and found them accompanied by the following letter:
Ticket holders will require one of the following forms of official identification, which should match your name on the ticket. This will be checked at the wrist band exchange.
– Original Bank Statement
– Bank Debit Card
– Original Photo Driving Licence
Ignoring for a second the unfortunately ambiguous use of “should”, when I presume they actually mean “must” (it should match the name on the ticket, but if it doesn’t oh well, never mind, you can come in anyway…), there has been something of a breakdown in communication between GFL and Seetickets, at least according to this post (and the many, many other posts from both confused punters and supposedly informed message board moderators). What they meant to say was that the bank statement/debit card should be the one used to purchase the tickets, not the one of the person named on the ticket. (“It is the bank statement of the ticket purchaser even if that is different from the person carrying the ticket.”)
GFL seem rather surprised that some people might have interpreted “match your name on the ticket” as meaning that the named ticket holder should bring his or her bank statement.
And quite apart from anything, this system is ludicrously easy to circumvent. So what was the point, exactly?
One reply on “Mr Cockup lives in Pilton”
…and isn’t the whole thing kind of nastily bureaucratic for a festival? The reason I couldn’t stand Glastonbury the one year I went (1998), apart from the permanent torrential rain, was the scale of the thing. Just too big. Kind of negates the positive effects of getting out of the city when 200,000 other bastards follow you.