Eagles fans snap up early bird tickets
City's volunteers man the phone banks all weekend; VIP tickets near sell-out
By Brent Mazerolle
Times & Transcript Staff
Published Monday April 14th, 2008
Appeared on page A1
Bryan Lem takes a call at City Hall where the City of Moncton set up their own call centre to take care of Eagles ticket orders.
How did the City of Moncton pull off the largest grossing concert in Canadian music history?
How is it that same show was the Rolling Stones' largest show of its 2005 North American tour?
Why is it Moncton will host The Eagles, John Fogerty, K.T. Tunstall and Sam Roberts Band August 2, a show that, as of this writing, is the biggest music event scheduled in Canada this year?
Some might think it's just geography, or the natural amphitheatre at the Magnetic Hill concert site. But between you and us, let's admit that other cities have highways and hills too.
A number of promoters who have dealt with Moncton in the past few years have said the city's strength is in finding ways to make things happen rather than looking for 10 reasons why something won't work.
If anyone needed an example of that, they need only look at this weekend in Moncton, when the city's ticketing system passed its first big test with flying colours.
While promoters of the Magnetic Hill Music Festival could not be reached last night, indications were the more than 30,000 ticket sales on Friday were followed up with strong numbers throughout the weekend.That's likely to continue today as the last chance to buy General Admission tickets at early bird prices comes to an end.
To handle the intense call volumes and Internet volumes expected when Eagles tickets went on sale Friday morning, the City of Moncton's Recreation, Parks, Tourism and Culture department set up a temporary call centre at the top of city hall.
There, about 30 employees from literally almost every branch of city government volunteered their time to become call centre operators.
If you called for tickets locally, you talked to the usual expert staff at the Moncton Coliseum. But if you called from every province in Canada and much of New England, as people did Friday and Saturday, you might have talked to someone who's normally a 911 operator or a horticulturalist or an IT specialist.
If you're surprised by this, so were the promoters, who only learned of it after the grand experiment had surpassed even the city's hopes. Recreation, Parks, Tourism and Culture's Ian Fowler admitted yesterday he was looking back at some sleepless nights this week and an amusing call to Donald Tarlton of Donald K. Donald Group on Saturday night.
Jillian Somers, who had the task of putting the whole thing together in the past couple months, agreed it was unusually bold not to involve the promoters, but insisted they would have worried needlessly.
"We knew our people could do it, but the promoter didn't," she said.
There were the normal delays because of high call volumes, but the system suffered none of the outages so often seen whenever and wherever big concerts go on sale.
As well, IT specialists led by the city's Dan Babineau, in conjunction with experts from Audience View which runs Moncton's ticketing network, prevented the Internet from crashing under the weight of as many as 800 transactions occurring at a time.
Fowler said it was a success for a number of reasons, but mainly because of so many staffers going above and beyond under the direction of Somers and Shane Porter.
The sixth floor of city hall also happens to be home to Moncton's command centre to handle civic emergencies, so the site had much of the infrastructure to handle this much happier sort of communications challenge. Nevertheless, Aliant and Audience View were also heavily involved in preparing for the weekend.
When the Rolling Stones came to Moncton in 2005, online and phone ticket sales were handled through Ticketmaster. After that, the City of Moncton decided to go it alone through the services of Audience View. The Eagles, therefore, are the first large-scale test of Moncton's new way of doing business, a model that gives the city a share of ticket revenues.
While Audience View has the big volume experience of handling ticketing for the Toronto Blue Jays, this weekend's Moncton experiment was also a big test for the company, which had a war room on standby in Toronto Friday in case anything should go wrong.
Nothing did, though in a separate development, there was some scrambling by city staff Friday to ship extra hard copy tickets to some of the Sobeys stores in Atlantic Canada, when they sold out faster than expected. About one-third of all tickets sold on the weekend were purchased at Sobeys stores, and Somers said sales were particularly strong in Newfoundland and Cape Breton.
Somers said the enthusiasm of the volunteer city staff, buttressed by training sessions and a last-minute pep rally Thursday, was mirrored by those Eagles fans who called in.
"We sold to a woman in Inuvik on Saturday," Somers said. "She said her husband has waited all his life to see The Eagles. It seems every call we got, we got a story, they were so excited to have gotten through."
The city hall "box office" has now closed, but the regular professionals at the Coliseum box office are still on the job to take calls, Internet purchases and sell tickets in person. They are also still available at all 81 Sobeys stores in Atlantic Canada. It was unclear at press time if there were still VIP tickets available, but it appears most are gone.
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