Ticketmaster is no stranger to irate customers.
Any company that charges hefty fees to process an automated order and to allow you to pick up your tickets at the box office is going to cheese off more than a few people.
But before this week, I'd never heard of Ticketmaster threatening to blacklist a customer just because she wanted to contact her credit card company.
Alexandra Le, 25, of Brentwood said she felt Ticketmaster's wrath after buying tickets for Monday's matchup between the Lakers and the Dallas Mavericks (the Lakers would go on to win, 73-70).
"This is not only completely immoral," she told me, "this is threatening a customer."
Le describes herself as a huge Lakers fan. She said she attended games at least once a month last season.
Le always looks first on Ticketmaster's TicketExchange site, where season ticket holders and others can sell their seats for games they won't be attending. Depending on who's playing, seats can be purchased for considerably less than the cost of a new ticket.
There weren't any seats available for the Lakers-Mavs game, Le said, so she went to the main Ticketmaster site and bought a pair of tickets for about $440, including fees. Thanks to a partnership between Ticketmaster and American Express, she was able to use rewards points to lower her cost by $68.
Just for the heck of it, Le said, she then returned to the TicketExchange site, and this time found Lakers-Mavs tickets for $125 each in the same row she'd just bought seats for $211 apiece.
Le called Ticketmaster and explained the situation. She said a service rep offered to refund the "face value" of her tickets — that is, none of the fees — "as a favor." But Le said that when she asked about her AmEx points, the rep told her he couldn't do anything about those.
Le didn't think this was fair. She said she'd contact AmEx.
As Le tells it, the rep then replied: "I don't want to upset you, but I will warn you that if you complain to American Express, you could be blacklisted from using Ticketmaster."
Say what? Le immediately asked to speak with a supervisor.
"The supervisor then said they wouldn't offer the refund," Le recalled. "He said that they were doing me a favor. If I was going to call American Express, they wouldn't help me."
Le's not the sort of person who takes that kind of thing well. She said she not only contacted AmEx, which proceeded to refund most of her reward points and credit her account an additional $25, but also the Better Business Bureau. Then she got in touch with me.
Jacqueline Peterson, a Ticketmaster spokeswoman, was understandably concerned when I relayed Le's tale of woe. She said she'd pull the recording of Le's conversation to confirm that the blacklist threat was actually made.
But what do you know? Peterson got back to me later and said the conversation hadn't been taped. "Most calls are recorded," she said. "This one wasn't."
Peterson said the whole thing may be a misunderstanding. She said the service rep probably told Le only that a disputed charge can result in further ticket purchases being suspended until the dispute is resolved.
"We don't have a blacklist," Peterson said. "That term isn't part of our vernacular."
I conveyed that to Le.
Save over 
