Monday mornings are rarely fun but for a portion of the UK and Ireland, today was even more stressful. Yes Swifties, we mean you.
US superstar Taylor Swift is finally set to bring her Eras tour to Europe next year and today, the pre-sales began taking place.
Given the drama when US tickets were released, Ticketmaster devised a system to lighten the load… which is also incredibly complicated.
To be in with a shot of buying tickets in one of this week’s 12(!) sales, fans needed to have pre-ordered Taylor’s latest album, Midnights, before its release last November. Everyone else needs to wait until next week.
The first batch of tickets were available to buy at 11am and with hours to go, #ErasTour and Ticketmaster were already trending on Twitter.
By the time it started, well, let’s just say it was all very stressful…
And, of course, it wouldn’t be a ticket sale without a few technical problems:
Which led to – yes, you guessed it! – even more stress...
After half an hour of being in the online waiting room, fans were finally given queue numbers, and some people were seriously unfortunate:
After anxiously watching their queue number reduce, some Swifties reported being unceremoniously chucked out of the Ticketmaster site:
Meanwhile on AXS, the only other site authorised to sell tickets, the decision had been made to not bother with queue numbers at all. Readers, this did not go down well:
People getting to the front of the queue meant the ticket prices were finally revealed. Cue frantic WhatsApps and savings accounts being raided…
Nothing can rival the sheer joy – and relief – of being successful:
The sinking feeling on seeing the pre-sale sold out, on the other hand…
Thanks to the (complicated) sale structure, fans have two more chances to buy tickets for the UK and Ireland tickets today, followed by at least nine others later this week.
If you missed out today and feel dejected, the spare a thought for the people who didn’t get a pre-sale code in the first place:
It’s going to be a long two weeks.