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By the time 180,000 Carolina Hurricanes fans poured into downtown Raleigh to celebrate the Stanley Cup Final win, all but forgotten were the anger and frustration some fans felt when they tried to buy tickets to the games.
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Fans had so many issues trying to purchase tickets on Ticketmaster that North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson got involved.
He wrote Ticketmaster a letter on June 4, asking the company a series of questions about the sale, including reports of and investigations into faulty technology and how the company deals with bots.
Ticketmaster responded on June 11.
It didn’t give specific answers to a few of Jackson’s questions about the presale period, including how many tickets season ticket holders were able to — and did — purchase, and how many total tickets were available.
Instead, Ticketmaster said all season-ticket holders could purchase tickets to all playoff rounds as soon as the Canes qualified for the playoffs, and that these fans could participate in a May 30 presale for “a limited number of additional seats for Stanley Cup games.”
Here’s what else Ticketmaster said.
Some fans reported having to enter the code to join the Stanley Cup Final presale multiple times before they were allowed to join the virtual queues to purchase tickets to games at the Lenovo Center.
But Ticketmaster told the attorney general that its “internal monitoring worked as intended and did not flag any downtime or technical issues through the on-sale process for single game Stanley Cup tickets.”
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And because Ticketmaster didn’t flag any issues, it didn’t investigate anything.
The ticketing provider said technical errors were not to blame for season ticket holders having trouble purchasing additional seats to Stanley Cup Final games.
Rather, if these fans couldn’t purchase tickets, it was “likely due to limited availability and the general process and promotion for gaining access for an opportunity to secure the additional seats made available by the team to their selected fans.”
Some fans who wanted to purchase Stanley Cup Final tickets said they were only able to purchase expensive resale tickets, even though they had early access to the sale.
Ticketmaster acknowledged that there was high demand for these events and said there were more than 100,000 unique IP addresses present.
It blocked “tens of thousands” of unique IPs during the Stanley Cup Final ticket sales, Ticketmaster said, defending its efforts to limit the effect of users trying to break the rules. Some of these IPs were missing security credentials, using multiple accounts, or had been previously flagged as “known bad actors.”
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