Every year, the Eurovision Song Contest suffers it's fair share of ticket sales problems on the day that the sales procedure start. This is almost unavoidable when an event is so popular. Yesterday, it appears that the rush of international callers temporarily led to the international telephone gateway to Finland being overloaded. YLE claimed that ticket sales had gone well, with all tickets to the final being sold out within two hours. Today, esctoday.com has found out that this is incorrect! There are a number of tickets still available for the final and are being sold by telephone on an individual basis.
esctoday.com have been closely monitoring the ticketing situation in an attempt to ensure as many fans as possible are able to buy tickets for their favourite show. It transpires that late yesterday it some individual tickets for the final were unsold and that fans calling the ticket office were able to purchase them.
Many fans will be angry to learn of this having been told that the tickets were sold out, and instead had to purchase expensive packages costing 390 euros in order to secure tickets to the final. These packages include a ticket to the friday night dress rehearsal and tickets to two semi-final dress rehearsals. The vast majority of fans feel that this packaging policy is unfair and are unlikely to use their tickets for both semi final dress rehearsals. This is in turn is likely to lead to a large number of seats being empty in the semi final rehearsals and many appearing on the black market, Ebay or finnish equivalent, Huuto.net.
esctoday.com spoke to Sepo Keski-pukkila, a manager at the ticket sales company responsible and asked him why it had been announced that tickets were sold out when they in fact had not been, and why fans were told that they had to buy packaged tickets when there were still many individual tickets available. We were told:
"The situation changes all the time. There are orders that they took that were cancelled. People changed their orders from individual tickets to packages. These are the tickets that went back on sale last night".
Can you explain why everyone that did this were seated in corresponding seats in the same blocks 315 and 316?
"These tickets were sold to international fans abroad. These people from these blocks moved to packages to get better placed seats".
So everyone seated in block 315 and 316 simultaneously cancelled their tickets at the same time?
"It’s not 1,000 tickets, I can’t say how many but it’s not as many as 1000. If you want to buy them, you need to call the call centre on the same number as yesterday".
To purchase the remaining tickets for the Eurovision Song Contest Final (for international fans), you need to call the ticket hotline on :+ 358 3036 00 30
