THE Fringe's new ticketing system is once again under scrutiny after customers reported their credit cards were charged numerous times for single bookings.
Festival organisers had hoped that the troublesome website had finally been sorted after a disastrous opening which saw the new Liquid Box Office system go offline for more than a week.
However, the box office has now started to receive calls from
disgruntled customers facing large credit card bills.
One woman received a bill for 30 tickets for a performance of Circus Oz at the The Assembly when she only ordered five.
Esther Scoburgh, 35, of Smith's Place, said: "The message 'Payment Provider Authentication Failed' came up when I booked the tickets and my basket of items was emptied. The website informed me that I should try again later.
"I did try again, five more times over the course of Saturday and Sunday but this time using my credit card instead. I was met with the same message on each occasion.
"The following day I checked my bank account and noticed that the full value of the tickets was taken out of my account. I phoned the credit card company who confirmed that the payment was taken out five times. I think this is an absolute disgrace. This is pure incompetence on the Fringe's behalf."
The Fringe's own messageboard has been inundated with similar complaints.
Phillip Stollery, another user on the site, said on Tuesday: "I really think they should close the website ordering until this is fixed. I have yet to have the call about the refund."
Fellow user Jess Pickles added: "I've just checked my account now after making several attempts to purchase tickets over the weekend and noticed three debits have come out.
"I'm worried that the site refers to the fact that tickets are non-refundable and non-returnable – but presumably if we don't even have the tickets then we're entitled to our money back?"
Fringe bosses acknowledged the error and blamed the multiple purchases on customers hitting the "buy" button on the website numerous times.
A Fringe spokesman said: "When we discovered this we initiated a message telling customers to only hit the 'buy' button once, and we are eventually going to have a fix in place that prevents multiple purchases like this occurring again.
"We will obviously refund any multiple purchases, and any refunds will be cleared off the system and the tickets put back on sale to ensure that the venues do not suffer a loss of sales through shows which may have appeared sold out because of the fault."
Software firm tells of glitchesTHE designers of the Fringe's £335,000 box office system have spoken out for the first time on the system faults that brought first week ticket sales to a halt.
Pivotal Integration Ltd, the company behind the Liquid Box Office system, said it failed to cope with the 20,000 or so requests it had to process on the first day.
Pivotal Director David Stapleton said: "We managed to keep elements of it running, but brought in a second web sales system to prop it up.
"The Fringe is the biggest arts festival in the world with around four million tickets going on sale and that's an incredible amount of auditing.
"Unfortunately software is software and it's prone to glitches."
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www.edfringe.comThe full article contains 569 words and appears in Edinburgh Evening News newspaper.
