Big headaches continue for Big Mountain ticket sales

GayRay put 40,000 passes for the sixth Big Mountain Music Festival on sale on Sunday and Pa Ted watched the proceedings at ThaiTicketMajor like a hawk, updating their status on Facebook and Twitter as if a crucial election were going down.

Thailand’s biggest open-air music festival is set for December 6 and 7 at Bonanza Khao Yai. 

“We’ve sold 16,000 tickets in the first 30 minutes!” came an early dispatch on Twitter. Aiding the speed of the operation was the fact that the tickets were selling for a “promotional price” of Bt1,500, whereas they normally cost Bt2,000. In no time there were 200 passes a minute moving from cashier’s hands to buyer’s, as well as through cyberspace. 

Pa Ted woke up early on Sunday and stayed on the case until past midnight, prodding the masses to grab that early-bird price. Learning from problems in the past, when scalpers snapped up armloads of passes to resell later at higher prices, he limited sales this year to 10 tickets per person.

The social media also gave Pa Ted instant feedback from the fans. Irregularities in sales were reported at ThaiTicketMajor in Korat. Someone was able to snag 142 tickets, and many others noticed that the 10-per-customer rule was being routinely broken. A photo of a suspicious pile of thousand-baht banknotes was tweeted. 

“Anyone who bought more than 10 tickets in Korat, please call (02) 262 3456 because your tickets will be cancelled,” Pa Ted announced across the networks, and then shut down the Korat kiosk at 8pm, far earlier than it was supposed to close. 

Technical problems at outlets included screens showing tickets sold out when they were not. Pa Ted said customers had to check on the situation regularly because the system was constantly updating. 

So, despite his best efforts to sell passes without hassles or heists, Pa Ted discovered he couldn’t quite eradicate all the glitches. Scalpers were already offering tickets on the website OLX while the official sales were still going on. “They’re sold out, so anyone who couldn’t get tickets can buy them here,” was the cheeky invitation to buy illegally at Bt3,000 a pop. 

Pa Ted responded with a bluff. “Tomorrow we’ll launch another promotion with Pepsi and the price will be only Bt1,700,” he tweeted.

When another scalper turned up on Instagram offering passes for Bt2,150, Pa Ted was steaming. “Don’t buy from this person – let him or her deal with the loss!” Anyone buying from unauthorised sources “risks holding tickets that are cancelled”, he declared. 

The overwhelming success of the official sales came close to being ruined by the chaos as illegal dealers appeared one after another – around a dozen in all, each selling stacks of tickets at high mark-ups. Korat was formally barred from handling the Big Mountain account. 

At the end of a long day, Pa Ted urged everyone to take a break from the social media and get some rest. He’d had more grief – Manchester City had ambushed his beloved Manchester United. “May I excuse myself and hit the bed?” he asked. “I need time to mend my broken heart.”