SFS Ticketing Update

 

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by me

So I managed to buy my SFS tickets today, on the last day of their free ticket offer. The process was painful:

1. Log in.
2. Proceed to subscription page.
3. Pick the day you want your tickets on. (Note: Fridays are more expensive than Saturdays, so I picked Saturday.)
4. Click the button for the subscription you want.
5. Pick your first choice section. (Note: You can't choose your seat because people who already hold subscriptions get to keep their seats. So until their orders are committed and fulfilled, SFS doesn't know which seats are unavailable and can't give you options.) 
6. Pick your backup section, in case your first choice is full.
7. Click Add to Cart. That takes you to your cart.
8. Scroll to the Add another series button and click it.
9. Go through steps 3 through 8 again. And again. And again. Because there's no way to select all four series and sections that you want at one time.
10. Select a couple of other concerts you want to see. Go through section choice flow for each of them.
11. Decide you can't stand it any more even though you know your missed something you want to buy.
12. Realize that there was nothing about free tickets, even though the SFS web site says that when you buy 18 or more tickets, you get eight free tickets. (Click through and scroll down.)
13. Call the box office, where what you find out leaves you shaking your head.
1. The free tickets aren't offered as a discount on your subscription, that is, buy 28 concerts, get eight of them free.
2. They are add-ons. Sometime after you buy, you get a voucher or something like that enabling you to request eight additional tickets at no charge. Yay, you can take friends free. 
3. That's nice, but none of the advertising makes this clear, nor does the web site.
14. Buy your seats.
15. Write this blog post.

You'd Think This Would Be Easy.

Davies Symphony Hall

Photo by me

I might have mentioned that San Francisco Symphony has an unbelievably schedule this year, with a great assortment of works, performers, and conductors, starting with Esa-Pekka Salonen, continuing through the SFSoundbox series, including a ton of new and new-to-SFS works.

I've been trying to figure out what to buy tickets to, and how much to spend, so I finally printed out the calendar, which shows every Davies performance plus chamber music programs that are elsewhere. It's in chronological order and there's nothing fancy about it. It took me about 15 minutes to scan and mark up. It turns out that there are around 25 orchestral programs that I want to see, plus a couple of youth symphony programs, a couple of Great Performers programs, some chamber programs, and a couple of films. The General with organ accompaniment? Hell, yes!

Then I called the symphony box office to ask what I thought should be an easy question to answer: which Friday and Saturday subscriptions will give me largest number of orchestral programs? And the first answer was "Open your printed season guide...." even though I had said "I am working from the calendar." I said that I didn't have it,* and the representative offered to email it to me. I said that I know where it is on line (I had been looking at it earlier and realized I wanted the quick and easy answer.)

I pressed the rep for a more....definitive answer, and clearly the person had to look this up, because they started to tell me the options. The person was figuring it out on the fly. I can do that myself, so I finally just said, "Okay, clearly I have to figure this out myself, if you can't answer this quickly, so thank you and goodbye."

Come ON. SFS, you can do better than this. I want to buy tickets THIS WEEK because it's possible to qualify for some benefits, and your rep can't say "To get all of the SFS orchestral programs on a Friday or Saturday, here are the subscription combos that work." Considering that it's pretty hard to sell subscriptions, you should be jumping to answer this question.

* It's actually weird that I don't, unless it's buried here someplace.

Update: It turns out that the answer to my question was simple: buy series A, B, C, and D on either Friday or Saturday. That's how you get tickets to all of the Orchestral Series programs. Two SFS reps whom I spoke to couldn't answer this. One of my readers did know the answer but didn't initially understand the question. 

 

Subscription Woes, San Francisco Symphony Edition, Part the 95th?

Photo by me.

I gave up some years ago on trying to subscribe to SFS before you can roll your own subscription, because the pre-packaged subscriptions 1) never have everything I want 2) always have concerts I would pay to avoid.

This year, the first appalling fact I want to surface publicly is that the only subscription that has both of Esa-Pekka Salonen's concerts on it is the 24-concert package on Friday nights. There are 21 different packages, but it's not obvious to SFS marketing, or whoever designs the subscriptions, that people who aren't ready to pay for a 24-concert sub might be interested in seeing both programs by the orchestra's incoming music director.

Similarly, only two series offer both MTT's semi-staged Flying Dutchman and Antonio Pappano's Act 1 of Die Walküre. Because it's a well-known fact that there just aren't many Wagner fans in the Bay Area.

This is the problem with having subscriptions that are strictly day-of-the-week- and length-based rather than interest-based. If SF Performances and Cal Performances can offer subscriptions for Early Music, New Music, Dance, Chamber Music, Theater, Pianists, and Vocalists, why can't San Francisco Symphony offer some interest-based subscriptions??? There's a handy listing of season highlights by category....which someone developed for the web site...but there aren't subscriptions based on these categories.

Also, I'm ready to buy tickets to 16 concerts, but because they don't fall on a single subscription, I either have to buy two or three short subscriptions to get close to what I want, then swap a bunch of tickets.

One of the principles I've espoused, on my Web Site Basics page, is "Make it easy for people to give you money." Why isn't SFS ready to take my money now rather than in June??

And, because I like to offer free advice, here's how ticketing should work for an organization such as SFS, beyond the fixed subscription packages.

1. You see a page listing the concerts, repertory, performers, and the dates of those concerts.

2. You pick a concert date.

3. You see a new page on which you pick your seat. (This exists already for every theater that uses Tessitura with the pick-your-own-seat module. SFS is one of them.)

4. When you accept the seat, the flow loops back to 1.

5. You go through this flow until you have every ticket you want. You click Review.

6. You see a page listing the concerts, seats, and prices, and the total price of your order.

7. You delete any tickets you're having second thoughts about and click Check Out.

8. You pay, make a donation, pay for parking, etc. And you're done!

(Consider this advice not only to SFS, but to Tessitura.)

Ticket Buying Hell

Okay, more evidence of why staff and board members and members of the press should go through exactly what the public goes through to buy tickets.

1. The organization's web site doesn't have a choose-your-own-seat option.
2. The box office's hours are during weekday working hours only.
3. Even if you call during those hours, you get an answering machine (and you hear about how to buy ticket on line - see 1 above).

I'd really like to see this concert, even though it's at a logistically difficult time for me, but my companion has some specific seating needs and the seating software didn't make the right guess in 10 tries. Also, the concert is selling poorly enough that there's a two-for-one offer. Maybe, just maybe, people aren't buying because they are having problems buying - and the first rule of selling tickets is "Make it easy for people to give you their money."