World Cup Swamped With Complaints About Tickets

With the opening game of the World Cup only two weeks away, there appear to be new problems with the event’s most precious resource--tickets, which were sent to the public this week. World Cup phone lines have been swamped with angry callers whose complaints range from receiving tickets to the wrong venue to being assigned seats other than what they paid for.

“It’s a debacle,” said one World Cup official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s happening to everyone, including staff. Staff and the public are getting tickets for games they didn’t even order and not getting tickets for games they did order. We’re getting hate mail faxed from all over the world.”

Although it is difficult to gauge the number of ticket complaints, the World Cup office in Century City, other ticket outlets and the U.S. Soccer Federation have received hundreds of calls this week. The reaction has prompted World Cup officials to add phone lines to deal with the volume.

Scott LeTellier, managing director and chief operating officer of World Cup 94, acknowledged that there have been calls, but characterized the response as well within the range expected for such a large event and noted the distinction between callers with questions and callers with complaints.

“It’s accurate to say there have been a large volume of calls,” he said. “But when you look at the number of tickets, it’s expected. This is the week things have been dumped. This is to be expected. I think things are going well.”

The World Cup is soccer’s quadrennial world championship and is the largest single sporting event in the world. The matches, which run from June 17 to July 17, are being held in nine U.S. cities, including Pasadena at the Rose Bowl.

Demand for the event’s 3.6 million tickets has been high. LeTellier said 196,000 accounts were serviced this week, which could represent as many as 3 million tickets for the tournament’s first and second rounds. All tickets will have been sent by overnight courier service and will have reached customers by Wednesday, he said.

Calls to The Times and World Cup have been high with fans who are either irate or confused. Stories of snafus have abounded.

In one instance, a fan paid $250,000 for an exclusive ticket package that he received this week, but he is seated on one side of the stadium and his wife is on the other. Another case has a customer buying five tickets together and finding that the five seats are all in a line directly behind each other.

The biggest number of complaints seems to focus on the placement of the seats, which were sold by categories rather than selling a specific seat. Category I tickets were the most expensive, and customers were told they would be seated between the end lines of the field. Category II tickets were to be in the corners of the stadium, and Category III seats were to be behind the goals in the end zones.

The average price of a World Cup ticket is $58, and a Category I ticket for the final has a face value of $475.

But World Cup officials have liberally interpreted the Category I zones, which in the Rose Bowl extend into the end zones. LeTellier said this was done so that entire sections could be kept to a single category, although four sections at the Rose Bowl are split between Category I and II seats.

“To pay that amount of money and sit in the corner is disappointing, it’s obscene,” said Leslie Moss of Los Angeles. He said he bought his Category I tickets in the first hour they were made available to the public last year. He said he paid $724 for two tickets to each of five games at the Rose Bowl. “We were promised seats between the end lines. These tickets were sold under false pretenses.”

After receiving his tickets this week, Moss said he spent a total of 40 hours trying to get through to the World Cup ticket hot line but gave up when all he got was a busy signal.

LeTellier attributed the problems to “computer glitches” and the human error of people taking orders over the phone. In most cases, he said, the problems can be rectified.

A spokesman for Ticketmaster, which has been selling tickets but has no role in assigning seats, said the week has “been hell.”

“We’re getting a lot of calls, but I don’t expect next week to be as bad,” he said. “We have been getting scenarios of all types: wrong venue, wrong ticket, not all the tickets were sent. Let’s put it this way, my days haven’t been fun this week.”

The Ticketmaster employee, who does not usually field phone calls, said he had been on the phone almost continually since Tuesday.

Even though it has nothing to do with World Cup ticketing, the U.S. Soccer Federation has not been spared the onslaught. Executive Director Hank Steinbrecher said many of his oldest friends have been calling him this week to complain about their tickets.

“I got calls until 1 in the morning,” Steinbrecher said. “They are even coming into Soccer House (USSF headquarters in Chicago) to complain. I don’t know the magnitude of the problem, so I don’t know how to judge the reaction.”

LeTellier called a staff meeting at World Cup’s Century City offices Friday afternoon to brief senior staff on the situation.

In January there was a huge backlog of ticket requests for the Premier Ticket program, an exclusive offering of the best seats along with a package of amenities. Those packages sold in the tens of thousands of dollars. The backlog of unfilled orders for that program at one point reached more than $40 million.

World Cup has established a hot line for ticket buyers. More lines are being added to handle the volume of calls. That number is (310) 277-9494. Ticketmaster’s hot line number is (800) 937-7337.

On a call to the World Cup number Friday afternoon, a World Cup public information worker said that he, too, had bought Category I tickets and had been assigned seats in the corner of the Rose Bowl. Asked if the World Cup offered refunds, the worker replied that all sales were final but told the caller that he would be willing to buy any unwanted tickets.