Rugby World Cup organisers have defended their ticketing system from criticism \u2013 and urged fans to be patient \u2013 after frustrated customers faced difficulties or waited up to five hours in a bid to secure seats at rugby\u2019s showpiece tournament in Australia next year.<\/p>\n
The first batch of tickets for the 2027 Rugby World Cup were up for grabs from midday on Wednesday in a pre-sale phase, in which registered fans had the chance to secure a limited number of seats to all 52 games at the tournament.<\/p>\n
The pre-sale ticket phase runs for two weeks \u2013 closing on March 4 \u2013 but early demand saw Taylor Swift-like scenes, with the Rugby World Cup ticketing website running extremely slowly under the large traffic, leaving fans stuck in limbo for hours in the waiting room.<\/p>\n
Social media was duly flooded with angry ticket buyers getting increasingly frustrated in the queue and with seemingly little progress; particularly those in the northern hemisphere who\u2019d stayed up in the wee hours of the morning to try and secure tickets.<\/p>\n
Some reported then being blocked from buying tickets due to having \u201crestricted access\u201d, which was related to settings on their phone or computer, or even dropping out after getting past the waiting room.<\/p>\n
The long waiting times appeared to be related to slow turnover, given people had 30 minutes to buy tickets; far more than most events.<\/p>\n
After four hours of the pre-sale, only category A and category B tickets for the final at ANZ Stadium were still available, priced at $1950 and $1550 respectively. The allocation of category C and D tickets \u2013 with the latter still priced at over $600 per seat \u2013 were exhausted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe system is performing as intended during the Presale,\u201d the Men\u2019s Rugby World Cup 2027 organisation said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rugby World Cup organisers have defended their ticketing system from criticism \u2013 and urged fans to be patient…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":487572,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-487571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/487572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}