Wulff Posted September 11, 2015 Share Posted September 11, 2015 This was the first day of online booking for the ROH Winter season for Supporting Friends, and once again the website was full of glitches. The operation in response to each seat request was sluggish and often ended in an error report and request to try again. Since booking opened at 9 am there was no one in the box office (opens at 10am) or the Friends office (opens at 9.30) to provide any assistance, although the telephone operator did offer the information that "they" were trying to do something about the problem. Eventually I was able to book all the tickets I wanted, although all insight evenings were fully booked, but I have pretty well given up ever getting in to one of those. However, the process was much slower and more laborious than usual. These problems have been going on ever since the ROH started online booking. Are they ever going to get it right? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Balletfanp Posted September 11, 2015 Share Posted September 11, 2015 Regarding the Insight evenings, as a Friend (lowest level!) I wasn't able to book for the Insight evening I wanted because I had other tickets to book at the same time and they had sold out before I got to them. However, when general booking opened they had released another 30 tickets and as I was on there at 9:00 I was able to nab one (maybe one of the advantages of being a Friend is that it does give you a second chance once general booking opens). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coated Posted September 12, 2015 Share Posted September 12, 2015 (edited) Yet another messed up booking day yesterday, and by the time I finally stopped getting error pages and recovered 2 precious ticket in my basket, I could kiss goodbye to any decent standing ticket for the more popular ballets... I'm feeling somewhat grumpy about the extra tickets I ended up with when I couldn't figure out whether my order had gone through or not and hence lost track of which performances I'm likely to see. It would be interesting to know what is being held back for phone booking. ETA: one of things that annoys me most about the ROH website is that you can't even quickly check what tickets you have. Instead you get 'upcoming events' spread out over several pages to show every single restaurant booking option IF on the rare occasions when it is actually working I just want a quick spreadsheet type list that can be ordered by date or performance and that includes the ticket cost so I know what I have booked and spend without having to wade through ancient emails. Edited September 12, 2015 by Coated 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alison Posted September 12, 2015 Share Posted September 12, 2015 I quite agree, Coated. You want each one listed in a line, and individually expandable if you want further details, or something like that, I think. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Don Q Fan Posted September 14, 2015 Share Posted September 14, 2015 I find ROH incredibly hard to even find a simple tickets tab I don't think there is one instead I go to the very bottom pull up 15/16 season /ballet and go from there. Incidentally I had problems with Paris Opera last week but that was more an overloaded website - in that case they give you a very short time to complete your purchase and it was too short for me so I lost the ticket in my basket and had to start again. Thankfully I still got a good ticket. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RuthE Posted September 14, 2015 Share Posted September 14, 2015 The quickest and easiest way I find to get from shopping basket to my next event on "booking day" is by using and returning to what I call the "shopping list" page. They don't make it easy to find these days - it used to come up if you clicked on the date of the "booking day" on any show page. www.roh.org.uk/events/booking/20150922 This link will work for ordinary friends' ballet booking day on 22nd September but for a future booking day, just amend the last few digits of the URL to show the correct date. 1) Paste the link into your browser 2) Bookmark it 3) When booking goes live, make your first booking 4) When your first ticket has been added to your basket, return to your bookmarked page instead of clicking "Continue Shopping". Depending on your browser you may find it quicker and easier to copy the URL once it's in your browser and paste it back in whenever you need to, rather than using a bookmark. Hope this is helpful to some! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Mallinson Posted September 14, 2015 Share Posted September 14, 2015 Ruth, that sounds like what Nigel Molesworth would call a wizard wheeze! Could be very helpful. Thanks. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bangorballetboy Posted September 14, 2015 Share Posted September 14, 2015 The quickest and easiest way I find to get from shopping basket to my next event on "booking day" is by using and returning to what I call the "shopping list" page. They don't make it easy to find these days - it used to come up if you clicked on the date of the "booking day" on any show page. www.roh.org.uk/events/booking/20150922 This link will work for ordinary friends' ballet booking day on 22nd September but for a future booking day, just amend the last few digits of the URL to show the correct date. 1) Paste the link into your browser 2) Bookmark it 3) When booking goes live, make your first booking 4) When your first ticket has been added to your basket, return to your bookmarked page instead of clicking "Continue Shopping". Depending on your browser you may find it quicker and easier to copy the URL once it's in your browser and paste it back in whenever you need to, rather than using a bookmark. Hope this is helpful to some! I also find it useful to print off the "shopping list" page and use it as a script for the booking (i.e. crossing off those I don't wish to book and confirming numbers of tickets for the others). When I'm doing my booking I only use the shopping list page for the first booking of any particular production. After that, I click on the link on my shopping basket page that takes me back to the "production page" for the production I'm still booking (e.g. clicking on the Romeo & Juliet link to take me to the page listing all the R&J shows and casts); once done with that production, I go back to the shopping list page from my history drop-down. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Wall Posted September 14, 2015 Share Posted September 14, 2015 I also find it useful to print off the "shopping list" page and use it as a script for the booking (i.e. crossing off those I don't wish to book and confirming numbers of tickets for the others). When I'm doing my booking I only use the shopping list page for the first booking of any particular production. After that, I click on the link on my shopping basket page that takes me back to the "production page" for the production I'm still booking (e.g. clicking on the Romeo & Juliet link to take me to the page listing all the R&J shows and casts); once done with that production, I go back to the shopping list page from my history drop-down. Thanks bangorballetboy. That is excellent advice. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RuthE Posted September 14, 2015 Share Posted September 14, 2015 Yes indeed - also good advice! I found myself doing that quite a lot when booking my Giselles. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
simonbfisher Posted September 16, 2015 Share Posted September 16, 2015 Booking for Friends+ very slow this morning - took 3/4 hour to secure tickets, and not that many to boot! Most of the time was spent watching the revolving icon (trying to prevent eyes doing the same) and refreshing the page when the ERROR message came up. It seems that the tickets I chose were in fact basketed but there was no indication that this was the case. Pretty poor show, really. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mummykool Posted September 16, 2015 Share Posted September 16, 2015 Simon, you are not alone. This morning has to have been the most stressful yet.We had our tickets safely in the basket by 9.02 but kept getting the error code when trying to actually pay for them. Email confirmation showed that each time we tried to pay we had made a £3 donation but not bought the tickets. We then got locked out and had to wait 10 minutes before we could log in again and the basket of course was then empty. The Friends phone line doesn't open until 9.30 but it was engaged by 9.20 and it took another 25 minutes of constant re-dialling to get through. During that time we tried again with more success only to find that the original order had now gone through as well. Fortunately the very nice lady I spoke to in the Friends Office managed to sort it all out for me and the Box Office have now confirmed I only have the original tickets. I wouldn't want her job for the world! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
A frog Posted September 16, 2015 Share Posted September 16, 2015 An interesting piece of information gleaned from their Twitter this morning, it seems some SCS tickets are kept aside for friends booking day. I hadn't realised the friends' allocation was released in batches (which would sort of defeat the purpose of being a higher-tiered friend) and wonder if the person manning the account didn't mix up the date with the general booking one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beryl H Posted September 18, 2015 Share Posted September 18, 2015 I have an E-mail to say Friends Booking has been postponed from 22nd September to 29th September, opera also from the 23rd to 30th, due to technical difficulties needing to be sorted out! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beryl H Posted September 29, 2015 Share Posted September 29, 2015 My experience today was very good (I was dreading it as I knew I only had until 9.20am before leaving for a dentist appointment) there was a waiting room but a different, better one and I only had to wait 2 minutes which meant they let people in at about 100 a minute. Got the ones I wanted with a few minutes to spare, hopefully the problems have been resolved! 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mary Posted September 30, 2015 Share Posted September 30, 2015 Yes the new system seemed to work well- the queue was not too long. Let's hope this is the answer..... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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