
The site is practically all Flash with an excuse for an ecommerce engine somewhere in the background. It looks very pretty and makes swooshing noises when you do stuff (well, it probably will in the next version when the marketing person who approved this monstrosity gets the budget for the “swoosh” sound) but when it comes to actually making bookings on the site, well, there it is a great big #fail!
Today is typical of my experience with the site lately. I decided to try using Safari because the last time I used Firefox the booking system didn’t work. I used to find the payment processing part of the site used to just hang in one or the other browser, can’t remember which one. I loaded the site (sort of, Safari seems to be reluctant to load Flash automatically so all I got was a black page and two “Flash” placeholders), picked out the seats I wanted, ignored the prompts to add additional charges to my already heft ticket fee and proceeded to a new tab to pay for the tickets.
It was looking promising until I clicked on the button to pay by credit card and got this gem:

You would think, from the error message, that the payment system had rejected my card but all I had done is indicate, using a flashy blue button, that I wanted to use a credit card to pay. It just didn’t seem to like that idea at all and rejected the very notion that I would pay for my tickets by credit card.
(I tried to book and pay for tickets in Firefox too – same error)
So now I am just going to go and book the tickets at the venue using the self-help terminals and hope that there are decent seats two rows from the front, at least!
What do you think?